Mort was standing near what looked very much like the lunar module that had landed on the moon in 1969 and, for a moment, Agnetha wondered if that was what it was. Mort did have a bit of a thing for spaceships.
Agnetha turned her attention to the men in the laboratory. The one with the white beard and cloak was Leonardo da Vinci. The tall gloomy-looking one wearing glasses and dressed in a grey suit and tie was J. Robert Oppenheimer.
And lastly, dressed smartly as always, and with a bushy moustache sitting under his nose like a sleeping ferret, was the third man looking at the plans: her very own Herbert George ‘H.G.’ Wells.
‘I knew it!’ muttered Agnetha. This was the third time this week that H.G. hadn’t been safely writing away when she’d called.
The big question was what could Mort possibly want one of her pet writers for? He wasn’t an engineer, a scientist or an inventor.
While Agnetha sucked her lip and searched for an answer, Mort turned in the direction of a muffled bark from outside the lab door, allowing Agnetha to glimpse the countdown clock on the screen of the computer.
Suddenly, as Mort opened the laboratory door and Werner, Festering’s incredibly stupid bloodhound, came lolloping in, the reason why Mort had been borrowing H.G. hit her like a slap in the face.
This was worse than she’d imagined. Much worse.
Werner had brought Mort a gift.
A soggy, half-chewed envelope poked out from between his slobbering jaws. He looked up at Mort and wagged his tail frantically.
Mort took the envelope between finger and thumb and wiped off as much of Werner’s drool as he could on the back of his sleeve.
‘How long have you had this?’ asked Mort. Werner didn’t reply.
Mort peered at the postmark. ‘This came more than a week ago, Werner!’ He glared at the dog. ‘What have I told you about hiding mail?’
Once again Werner said nothing. Instead he gave da Vinci’s groin a sniff before lying down on the laboratory floor and licking his own bottom.
Mort turned his attention back to the envelope. Although it was addressed to his parents, he had no hesitation in ripping it open, his logic being that since they had left Festering before there was even a postal system in operation, anything addressed to them had to be a mistake. He took out the single sheet of cheap white office paper that was inside. Despite being in Werner’s mouth, the contents were clear enough, and what colour there had been in Mort’s pale face drained clean away.
This was a disaster.
‘I have to go,’ said Mort. He looked at his team. Of all days!
‘Bad news?’ said H.G. ‘A problem?’
Mort stuffed the letter into his pocket and nodded. ‘Nothing I can’t handle.’ He turned on his heel and headed for the door.
‘Should we abandon the countdown?’ said Oppenheimer.
There was, Mort couldn’t help noticing, a tiny undercurrent of glee in his voice. ‘No!’ yelled Mort over his shoulder. ‘Keep the preparations on target. I’ll deal with this and be back before you know it.’ The door slid shut and Mort disappeared.
Ten minutes later he was in his bedroom at the very top of the North Tower, a rickety-looking finger of stone that jutted straight up from Festering’s main building.
He picked up a pair of powerful binoculars lying on a side table and looked out to sea. If the letter was correct, the first sign would be the Unk ferry turning into Unk Island’s only harbour. Mort glanced at his watch. Almost time.
The leaky old tub hardly ever came into shore unless there was mail or – and this was as rare a happening as Halley’s comet – a visitor.
Mort slowly scanned the ocean. A thick curtain of rain lay like a shroud over the south. After a few moments the rain lessened slightly and Mort brought the binoculars to an abrupt stop. He leaned forward, adjusted the focus and watched as the Unk ferry came into view before slowly, but definitely, turning towards the island.
‘Well, well,’ murmured Mort. Despite the importance of the day he felt a stirring of excitement in his chest. The letter hadn’t been lying.
An enemy was approaching.
On any other day, Mort would have relished the battle but today, with the launch being scheduled after two hundred years of preparation, it was a problem that needed a quick fix. There was only one person for the job.
Khan.
Mort lowered the binoculars and tugged a velvet rope that hung from the ceiling.
From deep in the bowels of Festering Hall came the rumbling boom of the ancient servant bell. The vibrations were still shaking the ornaments on the mantle when Khan appeared at Mort’s shoulder, silent as an assassin’s knife in the back.
‘I do wish you’d stop creeping up on me, Genghis,’ said Mort.
Khan shrugged. ‘Vot you vont?’ he said in a voice like distant thunder, turning his heavy-lidded eyes towards Mort. His expression was that of a barefoot man who has stood on fresh dog poo.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Mort. ‘You always look so miserable.’
‘I laughing on inside.’
The Mongolian warlord was dressed from head to toe in scabby-looking fur, his eyes set wide apart in an olive-skinned face, most of which was taken up by a waxed black moustache and beard. He was huge and, had it not been for the steel shock collar around his neck, controlled by Mort from a wrist-mounted remote control unit, he would happily have torn Mort apart with his bare hands.
‘I need you to take care of a little problem for me, okay?’
By way of answer, Khan spat noisily out of the window. Unfortunately it wasn’t open.
Mort shook his head. You could take the man out of Mongolia but you couldn’t take Mongolia out of the man.
‘It looks very much like we’ll be having a visitor,’ said Mort. ‘A woman is about to step off the ferry and she is not welcome on the island, particularly not today.’
Khan cocked his head.
‘Voman?’
‘Yes Khan, voman, I mean woman.’
‘And you vont me kill her?’ said Khan. ‘Is no problem. I kill many many vomens before. One day I kills seven hundred before lunch. And many many many mens. Iss easy.’
‘No, Khan, I do not want her killed. Not yet, at any rate. I just want you to … dissuade her. Scare her off the island. But do not kill, do I make myself clear?’
Khan frowned.
‘Just break bone?’
‘No, no breaking bones, Khan. Just get rid of her! I’ll monitor events from here.’ He moved forward and pressed a button concealed beneath the walnut panelling, which slid back to reveal a shining pole.
Khan wrapped a great hairy hand around it and dropped down through the North Tower.
‘And remember,’ shouted Mort, looking down the shaft as Khan disappeared, ‘no killing!’
It took Trish Molyneux longer than she’d thought to climb the steps. After a couple of minutes, the rain had slackened only for them to be engulfed by thick fog, hardly able to see a few steps below and a few steps above.
It was exactly like Jurassic Park, thought Nigel. He fully expected the sharp beak of a pterodactyl to loom out of the mist in front of them at any moment.
However, after almost twenty more minutes of slipping and sliding, they reached the top of the cliffs and stood, panting in the cold Unk air, without having seen anything that resembled a pterodactyl.
‘At least the rain’s stopped,’ said Trish. ‘Not far now, eh?’
Nigel looked around them. He couldn’t see a thing. How did Trish know it wasn’t far? He was just about to open his mouth to ask exactly that when the mist parted and, in the far distance, they glimpsed the jagged outline of Festering Hall perched high on a gigantic granite outcrop. Then, as quickly as it had lifted, the mist rolled back in, but not before Nigel had glimpsed what looked alarmingly like a swamp, complete with decaying trees draped in moss.
‘How on earth are we going to find that place now?’ said Nigel, waving a hand in the general direction of Festerin
g. ‘And what about that swamp? Did you see it? It looked like something out of a horror movie!’
‘Swamp?’ said Trish. ‘There aren’t any swamps round here, Nigel. What you saw was a marsh, which has, I believe, a path running through it. To the north.’ She opened her briefcase and took out a sheaf of printouts, each neatly encased in a plastic sheet. ‘And we’ll find it easily. I google-mapped everything before I came, just in case we didn’t have reception for the GPS.’ She waved her smartphone in the air, looked at it and frowned. ‘Which we don’t.’
‘But we don’t know which way is north. We don’t have a compa–’ Nigel tailed off. Trish had produced a shiny brass-plated compass from her briefcase. It looked like the sort of thing Scott of the Antarctic would have used.
‘We’ll do it the old-fashioned way, Nigel. It’ll be fun!’
Fun? Nigel had a funny feeling that very little on Unk Island was going to fall under the general heading of ‘fun’. He shrugged and followed his boss into the mist, her eyes fixed on the compass in her hand. For all he knew, Trish might have a helicopter tucked away in her briefcase. She seemed to have thought of everything else.
Ten minutes later they were in the swamp.
Up close it was ten times scarier than it had looked from a distance and it was, despite what Trish said, definitely a swamp. Stinking black and green mud bubbled up against the narrow pathway and Nigel could have sworn he’d seen shapes moving through the broken-down trees and decaying vegetation.
‘I really think we should go back, Trish,’ he said to Trish’s back as she strode into the swamp, the trees closing in above their heads. ‘Let head office deal with it.’
‘As far as this mission is concerned, we are head office, Nigel,’ said Trish, speaking over her shoulder as she entered a small clearing where the path widened a little. ‘And it’s our job to be here, Nigel. Our job. What would we say to Mr Skelly if we abandoned our mission now? He’d be dreadfully disappointed in us.’
There was no reply.
‘Nigel?’ said Trish as she turned around.
Nigel had vanished.
Normally, animals caught in one of Genghis Khan’s hoist traps made a lot of noise, perhaps sensing they were about to be served up like some Mongolian equivalent of a sausage sandwich.
This wasn’t the case with Nigel because he had cracked his head so sharply against a branch on his journey upwards that he had been knocked out cold, and was now tied up as tight as a Christmas turkey dangling in a butcher’s window.
Khan balanced on a branch midway up a decaying elm and looked down at the woman in the small clearing below, searching for her missing companion.
He scratched an itch inside the steel collar around his neck.
If it hadn’t been for the damn thing, he’d have thrown this woman and her stupid servant off the cliffs and made up some story for Mort about them falling off accidentally. But Khan knew from bitter experience that Mortimer DeVere was no pushover. ‘No killing’ he’d said, and Khan intended to obey. Mort had a way of sniffing out fibs like a terrier sniffing out rats, and an electric jolt from the collar was not something even the pain-hardened Khan wanted to repeat.
So Khan’s plan, such as it was, was a three-stage idea.
Stage one was to simply scare the visitors, shake them up a bit. This part, Khan had already completed.
Stage two was to scare them some more. This, Khan was about to do.
Stage three involved the visitors running fast back to the jetty and getting the ferry home. With a bit of luck Khan hoped he’d be home for the semifinal of American Idol.
Khan pulled out a sword from his belt and prodded Nigel’s limp body with the toe of his boot. Time for Stage two.
Nigel’s eyes opened. A split second later, with Khan’s blade waving in front of his face, so did his mouth.
Trish Molyneux was only four metres below but, had she been four hundred metres away, stone deaf, with cotton wool stuffed in her ears and her head in a bucket of water, there would have been no chance of her not hearing Nigel’s scream.
This close, it almost made her ears bleed.
Khan nodded happily. With Nigel making a noise like that, Khan knew any sane woman would be halfway to the ferry in no time.
‘Nigel?’ Trish said, peering up through the branches towards where Khan was sitting. ‘Are you all right?’
Khan blinked. Instead of turning tail and running back to the ferry, Trish kicked off her shoes and began to climb the tree. It was rough going, but the woman moved quicker than Khan would have believed possible, and in no time at all was high enough to see Khan clearly, one hand clamped firmly around Nigel’s mouth, the other clasping a fearsome-looking sword.
‘Oh,’ said Trish. Whatever she’d expected to find up in the tree, it wasn’t a Mongolian warlord from the thirteenth century.
Trish and Khan looked at one another.
Then Khan opened his mouth and roared, a gale-force howl of complete animal anger, which had reduced battle-hardened generals to tears before now.
Apart from wrinkling her nose, Trish didn’t seem to have noticed.
Khan roared again and waved his sword in Trish’s face as she rummaged around in her handbag.
As he opened his mouth to shout at the woman again, Khan realised something was wrong. His chin felt warm and he could smell smoke.
He looked down and saw that (a) the woman was holding a lit match and (b) his beard was on fire.
‘Goodbye,’ said Trish and, bracing herself against the trunk of the tree, kicked Khan hard between his legs.
Once, many years ago, the original Genghis Khan had woken to find a blood-soaked Persian warrior holding an axe to his throat only seconds away from separating his head from his body. Until this moment in the tree, he had thought that would be the most surprising moment of his life.
He was wrong.
Khan’s eyes opened wide and, with a high-pitched squeaking sound like a tyre losing air, he toppled slowly backwards out of the tree, his beard trailing smoke behind him. Trish smoothly lifted his sword from his limp fingers as he fell.
The Mongolian hit the ground with a thunderous crash and bounced into a pool of thick grey–green mud, steam rising from his flaming beard as he sank below the surface.
‘What a rude man,’ said Trish. Nigel just nodded. His mouth didn’t appear to be working.
Trish took Khan’s sword and sliced through the rope holding Nigel. Landing with a bump and scrambling free, he sprinted towards a thick tangle of greenery.
‘Nigel!’ yelled Trish. ‘Wait!’
By the time she’d climbed down from the tree, Nigel had disappeared for the second time that morning.
Trish checked her watch.
Four hours until the ferry came back.
She checked her compass and headed briskly in the direction taken by the panicking Nigel.
Behind Trish’s retreating back, Khan’s face rose slowly from the stinking mud. Smoke coiling around his scorched beard, he removed an eel from his ear and stared hatefully after Trish.
No matter what that pipsqueak Mortimer DeVere told him to do, Khan swore by the blood-drenched bones of all the mighty ancestor warriors of the Mongolian Empire and by the Ten Terrible Tribes of Borjigin, that that devil woman and her cry-baby servant would never leave Unk Island.
‘She did what?’
Mort looked away from the computer screen where he’d been rechecking the timing of the eclipse and stared at his sister. What Agnetha had just told him was so shocking he had clean forgotten about his annoyance at her coming into his bedroom without knocking.
‘She kicked your little pet right into the swamp,’ said Agnetha, smiling sweetly. ‘After setting his disgusting beard on fire. I saw it all, I was right there hiding in the bushes the whole time.’
Mort blinked. This was impossible.
‘Tell me again what happened, Aggers. In detail. This is important.’
Agnetha sat down on the edge of Mort’s bed
and went through the story again, without letting slip she knew about the secret laboratory. You never knew when that information might come in useful.
As his sister spoke, Mort’s face remained stern, but deep inside he felt a wonderful little electric thrill.
The woman had defeated Khan!
An opponent who could do that was a worthy enemy indeed.
Still, thought Mort with a glance at Agnetha’s smug face, he could do without his sister’s obvious glee at Khan’s defeat.
‘You do know why they’re here, Aggers?’ Mort asked. He plucked the letter from his pocket and handed it to Agnetha.
She unfolded the sheet.
Dear Sir/Madam,
It has come to the attention of the Unk Shire Education Department that there are two children of school age residing at Festering Hall, Unk Island. As our department has no record of either child attending school, and since repeated letters have remained unanswered, we have no course of action but to come to you in person to assess the educational needs of your children with a view to their immediate and compulsory school attendance. My assistant and I will be with you on Friday 21 March at eleven am.
Yours sincerely, Ms Patricia Molyneux,
Unk Shire Assistant Chief Education Inspector.
Agnetha looked up from the letter. ‘They want us to go to school?’
‘Bingo,’ said Mort.
Agnetha sucked her lower lip. ‘I’ve already been to school. Lots of times. I don’t want to go to school again.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mort. ‘The cheek!’
Mort looked at Agnetha. ‘We have obviously underestimated this Ms Molyneux. She’s got to be stopped at all costs!’
‘What’s this “we” stuff, Mort? Khan is yours. I didn’t have anything to do with your stupid plan. And what’s this “at all costs” stuff? It’s only school! I’m sure we can wriggle our way out of anything she throws at us.’
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