Archer's Goon: Chapter 14
A LEGO tribute to a fun and original YA novel
Hello! If you’re looking for The Drawing Book’s usual comics, you can find them here.
Welcome to our LEGO re-enactment of Diana Wynne Jones’s awesome and highly original novel Archer’s Goon. My eight-year-old son and I did this a couple of years ago, and luckily, we took some photos! I’ve included some excerpts from the text, so you can see what our LEGO scenes are meant to be portraying.
If you haven’t read the story, none of this will make much sense. But, if you haven’t read the story, you shouldn’t be here anyway - you should be heading to your local bookstore/library to get a copy of Archer’s Goon!
If you want to start at the beginning, here’s where you can find all the chapters.
Or, read on!
Chapter 14
Ahead… he could see, rather mistily, a flight of four shallow marble steps leading up among the scaffolding.
He went up the first step. His left boot did not go spuff there because it was no longer a boot, but a neat shoe at least two sizes larger than the boot. It took quite a push to get himself and his right foot on to the second step. The training shoe on that foot was now black, and so were the jeans on the leg above it.
At the fourth step, which took a real heave to get up on to, the marble temple looked almost real and Howard could hardly see the girders. His right foot came down on that step in a spongy, boot-like shoe and a tight white trouser leg. And it was the same kind of shoe and white trouser on the other leg when he forced himself forward on to the marble floor.
He was, he saw, wearing a loose quilted coat, like a futuristic version of Hathaway’s robe. And he must have been more than seven feet tall.
…
He began balancing in careful strides down the long marble hall, silent in his spongy shoes.
…
…At the end of the hall… there was a round antechamber with two vast arched doorways leading off it. On the floor of this round space was a heap of typewritten paper, some of it old and yellow, some of it white and new - a surprisingly small heap. Thirteen times eight thousand words did not make much more than two hundred pages. … So this was where all Quentin’s words ended up.
Howard dropped the paper back on the heap and stepped around it to look through the left-hand archway. There was a huge domed marble room beyond, completely empty. Wondering what possible use such a room was to anyone, Howard scuffed past the papers to look through the right-hand arch. The humming seemed to be coming from there. He stopped in the doorway with a gasp of admiration.
It was another domed marble room, but this one had a spaceship in the middle of it. The spaceship was the most elegant thing Howard had ever seen.
The ship was obviously not quite finished. Robots were working on it - not man-shaped robots, but things like elegant little diggers or metal giraffes. They were working as busily as people at all sorts of tasks. Perhaps they were being controlled from some of the banks of installations around the walls of the room. Howard looked around at the readouts, small lights and ranks of little square buttons. Like the queer robots, they all were strange and compact and most beautifully designed. Venturus had technology here that made Archer’s look like flint axes.
The nearest robot trundled up to him. Howard froze. But the machine only spoke to him, in a voice like a mouth organ. “Advise not to enter ship,” it said. “Final tests entail vacuum in interior.”
“Is it nearly finished then?” Howard said, almost whispering with wonder.
“Take off planned for twenty-one hours tonight,” the machine mouth organed. After that it ducked a metal scoop politely and trundled back to its work.
We had fun building Venturus’s temple. We made sure to include a few LEGO “statues” of Venturus himself, although you can only see one of them in the photos.
And now Howard/Venturus pushes the buttons that connect to the siblings’ locations:
The image on the wall… was misty and remote, as if even Venturus’s technology had found it hard to go back six hundred years or so.
…
It took Howard a moment to gather that they all were trying to rescue Bess’s kitten from the top of the tree.
He hesitated before pressing the fifth button, for Torquil, but he still went ahead and pressed it. Torquil seemed to be in the cathedral. He was dressed as a priest this time, in black robes and a white surplice, and he seemed utterly dejected. He was sitting all alone on the steps of an altar, with his hands clasped around his robed knees, just staring. He clearly thought he was private. Even more uncomfortable, Howard hurriedly pressed the last button, telling himself it really was important to know what Erskine was doing.
The car park was almost empty. As Erskine rumbled the digger among the few cars there, Howard noticed that one of them Archer’s Rolls. Ahead was a huge blank-ended building, and that was surely the back end of Archer’s workshop. Erskine lined the digger up with the blank wall. He lowered the scoop halfway. “Emergency entrance,” he said. “Keep down.”
He put the digger into lowest gear and crept at the wall, roaring and shaking like an earthquake on wheels. There was an almighty crunching, cracking and shrieking of metal. Erskine spread his great hands across his head and leaned sideways, squashing Howard, Awful and Ginger down on the seat. None of them saw what happened. Everything for a few seconds went judder, judder, roar, roar. The digger stood still and shook.
Erskine sat up again. “That fetched him,” he said with satisfaction. He ducked in a hurry. Fire and sparks exploded around the digger in clouds.
To be continued…