by P. B. Kerr
“Do you have a better idea?” asked John.
“No,” admitted the professor. “But I’m not wearing rubber-soled boots. And I can’t allow you to go. It wouldn’t be right. You’re — children.”
“Maybe so, but there’s another reason it makes sense for one of us to go,” said Philippa. “Djinn like us are made of fire. Not earth, like mundanes. I mean, humans. So, it has to be assumed that we stand a much better chance than you of surviving a bolt of electricity from the Mongolian death worm.”
“She’s right,” said John. “She’s always right.” He shrugged. “But it should be me who goes. I’m a much faster runner than you.”
Philippa nodded. “I’ll buy that.”
The twins started to throw bones out of the hole, one after the other in quick succession, and each time a bone appeared the death worm sent a bolt of electricity in the same direction. This continued for almost an hour, with the professor keeping the creature under observation in the mirror of his Brunton.
“Is it tiring yet?” asked Philippa. “Because I am.”
“No, not yet,” said the professor. “Not obviously.”
“Keep throwing,” said John.
“When I bought this thing,” said the professor, “I hardly suspected that this is what I’d use it for.”
“If it saves our lives, it will have been worth every penny,” said Philippa.
“You know, we should really use something else before one of us goes out there,” said John. “It’s hard to tell how much current it’s using against old bones.” He was looking at Moby while he said this and it was quite clear to Philippa what her brother was driving at.
“Oh, no,” she said, stroking Moby’s green head. “You’ve never liked him. I let him fly out of here and we end up with roast duck.”
“You’d prefer I get roasted, is that it?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well then.” John hurled another bone into the air with frustration. “You ask me, it’s about time that duck earned its passage.”
“He’s right, Philippa,” said the professor. “We need something living with which to test the worm’s power.” He shrugged. “And look, it’s quite possible that the worm won’t be expecting something that flies out of the hole and keeps on flying.”
Philippa said nothing.
“You know,” continued the professor, “I used to go duck shooting when I was a boy. And I never ever managed to hit one. Not ever. Ducks are pretty quick in the air. Much quicker than you think. I seem to remember that ducks can fly at up to sixty miles per hour.”
“And what will we learn if the worm misses him?” said Philippa. “Only that ducks can fly fast.”
“We’ll know that the worm is getting tired, perhaps,” John said lamely. “But you’re right. We’ll find out a lot more if Moby does get hit.” He threw another bone out of the excavation. “What can I say? I’m all out of good ideas. And unless you want me to go down that ladder and risk obliteration under that ossuary thing, we’re all out of bones, too.”
Philippa nodded. Without a doubt, John and the professor were both right but that didn’t make it any easier to risk the life of her pet. She stood up and collected Moby off the platform. She kissed him on the head and spoke gently into his all but invisible ears. Then she lifted him to the hole above their heads and threw the bird into the air as if he were a homing pigeon she was sending on an important mission.
There was a loud flapping and quacking as Moby quickly ascended through the air.
“Go, Moby, go!” she shouted as the duck flew out of sight.
Then there was a blue flash and with a scream of fear, she grabbed the Brunton from the professor’s hand and was just in time to see Moby drop with a thud onto the plateau as if shot by a hidden duck hunter. But he was not dead. For a moment he lay there, stunned, with one wing trailing to the side before he shook his head, collected himself, and got up onto his feet again, quacking a little and preening himself where some of the feathers were now missing from his body.
All of which seemed to draw another bolt of electricity the poor duck’s way.
Moby quacked loudly and somersaulted as the impact of the electricity knocked him over again.
“Stay still, Moby!” yelled Philippa. “Don’t move. It’s the movement that makes the worm attack. Stay still or you’ll be killed.”
But John had already arrived at a very different conclusion.
CHAPTER 38
SCHADENFREUDE
Groanin had not moved a muscle since the arrival of the horrible, slimy, giant red worm onto the plateau. The lethality of this hideous creature was quickly confirmed to the butler when a poor bat, attracted by the lights of the barn, had fluttered in and was apparently hit by a powerful current of electricity generated by the creature’s throbbing and slimy body. By the time it hit the ground, it looked like a burnt Frisbee.
As a consequence of the bat’s incinerated fate, Groanin had recognized the importance of remaining completely still for fear of attracting the worm’s attention and, in this respect, it was fortunate that he had been sitting down beside a sleeping Nimrod when the nasty, great, wormy thing — as he now thought of it — slithered out of the damp Mongolian fog. It was easier keeping still when you were sitting down: The one thing Groanin knew about all large and nasty-looking animals that killed things was that it was always best to keep still. But through clenched false teeth and in the hope of awakening the sleeping djinn, he had spoken to Nimrod as loudly as he dared; yet despite this, his employer remained more soundly asleep than would have seemed possible. In all the many years Groanin had worked for Nimrod — and, being his butler it was duty, at home in London, to waken his employer with a handsome breakfast and a freshly ironed newspaper — Groanin had never known Nimrod to sleep so solidly.
“No one would believe that a man employed by a powerful djinn could find himself involved in so many scrapes as me,” he muttered quietly to himself. “One scrape after another. If I ever get out of this alive, I might just go to bed and stay there for a week.”
An hour had passed in this way during which time Groanin had worried that the others would not come out of the hole and rescue him, and then worried that the others would come out of the hole and be killed themselves, as poor Axel was the minute he had climbed back onto the surface of the plateau.
“Poor lad,” Groanin muttered. “Such a nice young fellow, too. Hey, Nimrod, you great, fat pudding, wake up and do something before your nephew and niece are killed as well.”
But Nimrod remained asleep.
Even when someone — John? Philippa? — started throwing old bones out of the excavation and these had been noisily zapped by the beast, one after the other, like clay pigeons, the djinn had stayed asleep.
Then Moby, Philippa’s duck, had flown out of the hole and, despite being electrocuted, too, had not been killed, at which point Groanin had recognized the cleverness of throwing the bones out of the hole, which previously he had regarded as nothing more than stupid folly. Now he perceived that the creature was tired and that, like a common alkaline battery, its electricity-generating organs were running out of power.
This realization was quickly followed by the sight of John leaping out of the excavation, holding a large sheet of rubberized canvas in front of him and running bravely toward the worm with the evident intention of rendering the worm harmless.
“Attaboy, John,” he yelled, and got to his feet to help.
It was as well he did because the bolt of electricity the creature had intended for John came Groanin’s way instead and knocked Groanin off his feet and left him lying stunned on the ground and gasping like a newly landed salmon. It was this impulsive action on Groanin’s part that gave John sufficient time to throw the rubber tarpaulin over the Mongolian death worm, thereby insulating its electrically charged body long enough for him to deliver a well-aimed kick at each end of its body, and with the not-unreasonable assumption that one of these ends was
the creature’s head.
The creature lay still, at which point, cheering and shouting loudly, John jumped on its thicker section, up and down, as heavily as he was able, which was part triumph and part determination to make sure the creature was beaten.
“I’ve beaten it!” he yelled. “It’s dead. The rotten, murderous, slimy thing is dead. Hooray! Hooray!”
Nimrod sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What’s all the shouting about?” he yawned.
On top of being hit twice by a bolt of electricity, all of this shouting and cheering was too much for Moby. He flew off and was not seen again.
Groanin pointed. “It’s a nasty, great, horrible, red, wormy thing that John has killed or immobilized,” he said. “For the last couple of hours while Your Majesty has been asleep, it’s been patrolling the plateau, killing poor Axel and keeping the rest of us in terror. And John killed it. At least I hope he did. I feel like cheering myself.”
There was no time for Nimrod to say anything. But recognizing the huge danger John was now in, he had just enough time to create a strong gust of wind that blew John from off the worm’s body and several feet through the air.
Emerging from the excavation, Philippa screamed, for she thought that John must have been hit by another bolt of electricity from the Mongolian death worm. Instead, John landed harmlessly on the ground and scrambled to his feet just in time to see Nimrod bring all of his remaining djinn power to bear on the worm and render it completely harmless.
“Thank goodness you’re all right,” said John. “We thought the worm had got you both. We were worried about you.”
“Not as worried as I was when I saw you jumping on that olgoi-khorkhoi. That’s Mongolian for ‘large intestine worm.’ ”
Nimrod drew back the rubberized canvas sheet to take a closer look at the creature.
“That is what it looks like, all right,” said John. “But I had it licked.”
“Perhaps you did,” said Nimrod, “but jumping up and down on a Mongolian death worm is never a good idea. Which is why I blew you off. This kind of polychaete is very rare, you know. Almost extinct.”
“That was you?”
“Of course.”
“I like that.” John scowled. “Here am I trying to kill it and you’re worried about it being extinct.”
“You might have been extinct yourself,” said Nimrod. “The Mongolian death worm’s body is filled with a particularly powerful sulfuric acid. If it had burst while you were using it as a trampoline, you might have been severely burned, my boy. Perhaps even killed. That’s why I blew you off and then neutralized the acid inside the worm.”
“Oh, I see. I didn’t know.”
“No, well, why should you? These things aren’t exactly common, thank goodness. I expect it was created by Genghis Khan himself before he died and set here by his sons to guard the tomb. That seems to be the only explanation for the worm being so very long lived as this one.”
Philippa wiped the tears from her eyes and came and hugged her uncle, and Groanin, too. “I thought you were both dead,” she said.
“No,” said Nimrod. “Just asleep.”
She looked at Axel. “What are we going to do with Axel?” she asked. “We can’t leave him here.” She swallowed with difficulty. “He was so — so very nice.”
“No, of course, we’re not going to leave him here.” Nimrod went and placed a hand on the professor’s shoulder. “We’ll take him with us, poor fellow.”
“Thank you, Nimrod,” said the professor.
No sooner had Nimrod uttered these words than he had spoken a diminuendo, reducing Axel’s burnt body to the size of a tiny doll so that they might easily carry him with them on the flying carpet. Then he placed the cadaver inside a cigar tube and handed this to the professor.
“In this way you can easily carry him back to Iceland, and have him buried there,” explained Nimrod. “All you have to do is take his body out of this cigar tube when you get back home and it will be returned to its previous shape.” He shrugged. “What’s left of it. I’m so very sorry for your loss, Snorri.”
The professor nodded and slipped the cigar tube into his coat pocket.
“Ten years he’s been with me,” said the professor. “I shall miss him very much.”
“Groanin?” said Nimrod. “Would you be kind enough to drag the worm’s body over to the excavation and drop it in the hole?”
“Very good, sir.”
Nimrod looked at the twins. “Now then. To business. There’s no time to lose if we’re going to prevent a climatic disaster. What did you two discover in the tomb?”
“Very little, I’m afraid,” said Philippa. “And only what we always suspected: that one of the things that was there but which is there no longer was those Hotaniya crystals. We’ve also confirmed that someone robbed the grave. And, quite recently, too.”
“Good grief, is that all?” Nimrod sighed irritably. “Groanin, wait a moment. Before you tip that worm into the hole I’d better go down there and take a look for myself.”
“Very good, sir.”
“You won’t find anything,” said John. “Just a lot of bones. And a sword.”
“What, nothing at all?” said Nimrod.
“There’s a skeleton on a throne that looks as though it must be Genghis Khan,” said Philippa. “And he’s sitting under this mountain of bones.”
“How did you know it was him?” asked Nimrod, approaching the excavation.
“For one thing, the sword that was lying across his thighs,” said John. “And because his feet were on a map of the Mongol conquests.”
“A fair assumption,” said Nimrod. “Anything else?”
The twins shook their heads.
“Professor?”
“Nothing,” said the professor.
“No matter how small,” insisted Nimrod.
The twins shook their heads.
“You’re sure?”
“Sure, we’re sure,” said Philippa.
“Well, there was some wastepaper they dropped,” said John. “But it was nothing important.”
“What sort of wastepaper?” asked Nimrod.
John shrugged. “A chocolate bar wrapper, that’s all,” he said. “Nothing that really helps identify who could have robbed the grave.”
“Let me see.” Nimrod snapped his fingers at John urgently.
John frowned. “I’m not sure if I even kept it,” he confessed, searching his trouser pocket. “What with the worm ‘n’ all, it kind of slipped my mind that I had it.” He shook his head and then tried the other pocket. “Hey, it’s only a candy wrapper. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal, as you put it, is this, John,” said Nimrod. “It is almost invariably the case that the important clues to crimes are apparently small and insignificant. That is the first principle of forensics. You must learn to overlook nothing, no matter how inconsequential, for all detectives worship at the altar of coincidence and small things.”
John moved on to his coat pockets and finally he found what he was looking for. He handed the golden wrapper over to his uncle who spread it flat on his palm.
The chocolate brand was not one either of the twins — who liked chocolate — had ever heard of. Indeed, the only reason John had recognized that it was a chocolate bar wrapper was the fact that the word chocolate appeared under the logo RAKHA.
“This is no ordinary chocolate wrapper,” said Nimrod. “This is the wrapper from a box of the most expensive chocolate in the world. A box of RaKha plain chocolate costs almost a thousand dollars a pound.”
“For a box of chocolates?” Groanin was appalled. “You’re joking. How could a box of chocolates ever cost a thousand dollars a pound? And who would be mug enough to buy it?”
“I believe the chocolate is obtained from cacao beans grown in the finest plantations in Ecuador, Trinidad, and Venezuela,” said Nimrod. “And people do buy it. After all, everyone likes chocolate.”
“At a thousand dollars a pound?”
said Philippa. “It doesn’t seem possible.”
“That isn’t RaKha’s most expensive box,” said Nimrod. “They have a line of chocolates called RaKha Eldorado that costs almost twice as much because Eldorado chocolate is made by applying real flakes of twenty-four-karat gold to each praline by hand.”
“So you’re eating gold, as well as chocolate,” said John.
“Just like that unspeakably disgusting Roman emperor Heliogabalus,” said the professor. “Who abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures, including, I believe, a drink made from gold.”
“Precisely,” said Nimrod.
“Give me a Hershey bar any day,” said John. “But what does it tell us apart from the fact that the grave robbers had a taste for very expensive chocolate?”
“It tells us a great deal,” said Nimrod. “According to Mr. Bilharzia, there were only four copies ever printed of The Secret Secret History of the Mongols by Sidi Mubarak Bombay, the book he wrote about the search for the tomb of Genghis Khan with the help of his friend, Henry Morton Stanley. And one of those copies is owned by a man called Rashleigh Khan, who believes himself to be the descendant of Genghis Khan.”
“Along with sixteen million other people,” remarked Groanin.
“Exactly so,” said Nimrod. “The man is deluded, certainly. However, he is very rich and very powerful and he is the owner of a large multinational corporation called RaKha that makes, among many other things, this very expensive chocolate.”
“Wasn’t his yacht anchored in the Bay of Naples?” said Philippa. “When we were on vacation in Sorrento?”
“The Schadenfreude,” said John. “I remember. It’s supposed to be the largest yacht in the world. Six hundred and fifty feet from bow to stern.”
“Yes, that’s right,” agreed Nimrod. “And it’s a yacht that’s well named in the case of Mr. Rashleigh Khan. Schadenfreude is a German word, but a loanword in English. It means ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others.’ ”
“Then I must have been feeling Schadenfreude when I was cheering as I was jumping up and down on that horrible worm,” said John.
“Indeed, you were,” said Nimrod. “And, in that particular situation, your sense of Schadenfreude was entirely justified. However, when we think of Mr. Rashleigh Khan, we must imagine a man cheering while jumping up and down on the bodies of the people he has stepped on in order to reach the top. Who delights in their ill luck. A man who once confessed during a television interview that nothing confounds him so much as a good friend’s success.”