Every evening at dusk, fruit bats fly over the attic roof. Gliding silently, they come. First one, then another, black silhouettes against the darkening sky.

Do you know what baby bats are called? Click the photo to find out if you’re right.

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New things are great. Shiny and clean. All their adventures are ahead of them.

But I prefer old things. Old things are dripping with mystery and full of stories. Why is that rusty key such a strange shape and what does it open? What’s the strange doodle on page forty-seven of that musty old book? Is it a clue that will take me on a wild adventure? And is the person who owned the book really called Chris P. Bacon like it says in the front because that would be a rotten trick for parents to play on a kid!

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In a corner of the attic, inside a battered old brown leather suitcase are some books I loved as a kid.

I kept The Musical Umbrella not only for the wonderful story but also because I love the illustration style. Before you even know what a book is about, it’s the cover illustration that makes you pick it up!

Click on the pic to find out what happens when you open the umbrella.

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Here’s a puzzle! Rummaging around in the attic the other day, I found this — an old notebook I used when I was writing 88 Lime Street. It’s full of doodles and mind maps, almost as wild as the garden in the story. In the margin on one page is a word ladder (you know, where you change one letter of a word to make a new word until you reach the answer). My word ladder is SORT to LIME in five moves. (I must have been trying to sort out my thoughts about Lime Street.)

Can you solve the puzzle? Click on my notebook to see the answer.

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Behind the cobwebs, right at the back of everything else, there’s a small wooden trunk. Carved in tiny letters around the keyhole, there’s a word.

Open the trunk to find out what it says.

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Okay, there aren’t actually any hieroglyphs in the attic. But I have used them in a story. Unless you’re an Egyptologist, they’re like a secret code. I love codes and ciphers. Here’s one I used in my story The Bookshop.

SDC EXNOB DRO CDKSBC

It’s a Caesar shift, where each letter is substituted by a letter a fixed number of positions down the alphabet. Can you work it out? Here’s a clue: EDISON

Click on the pic if you need more help!

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