Floods 12

by Colin Thompson

  Rockall is such a tiny rock that it was impossible to see it on the map, but a couple of minutes later that was where Geoffrey-Geoffrey came to a sudden and final halt.

  He had arrived.

  ‘What is twelve dolors times three thousand to the power of seventeen?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘Well, off the top of my head,’ said Quenelle, ‘it’s approximately 286,511,799,958,070, which I think is more than all the money in the whole world added together.’

  ‘Hey, now that means you own the entire world and everything,’ said Gruinard. ‘Don’t spend it all at once!’

  ‘Right,’ said Nerlin.

  It was still hailing little frozen bits of his mother when Geoffrey-Geoffrey came flying out of a crack in the rocks. He shot out with such force, followed by a huge gush of water, that it sent Ex-King Quatorze – who had been crouching right in front of it trying to hide from his beloved wife, the revolting, rude, overweight, lumpy, spotty, smelling-of-deadfish and generally bad-tempered Countess Slab – crashing right into the aforementioned Slab’s very big bottom.

  ‘Don’t think you can get back in my good books by flirting with me,’ she cried, as she went headfirst into the sea for the seventh time that day.

  ‘I wasn’t, my beloved,’ Ex-King Quatorze said, helping her out of the violent waves. ‘Something hit me in the back.’

  ‘Something? Something?’ Countess Slab snapped. ‘There ain’t no something here. There’s only you, me and these dirty frozen hailstones.’

  ‘And there’s the something,’ said the ex-King. ‘Look.’ He pointed to where Geoffrey-Geoffrey had fallen down a hole between two rocks and was whimpering in a state of semi-consciousness.

  ‘Oh my God, what is that?’ said the Countess, poking Geoffrey-Geoffrey with a stick.44

  He may have been semi-conscious, but Geoffrey-Geoffrey’s reflexes were as sharp as his temper. He grabbed the end of the Countess’s stick and gave it a violent tug, which took her by such surprise that she let go of it.

  ‘Right, lumpy,’ he said, jumping out of the hole. ‘Where the hell am I and when is the next train out of here?’

  ‘Rockall,’ said Ex-King Quatorze.

  ‘Don’t you swear at me,’ Geoffrey-Geoffrey shouted.

  ‘No, stupid,’ said the ex-King. ‘That’s where you are – Rockall.’

  He led Geoffrey-Geoffrey up to the highest point of the forsaken rock and waved his arm around.

  ‘See? Rockall,’ he said. ‘No train, no more land, no escape, just miles and miles of very angry cold waves for as far as the eye can see in every direction.’

  ‘And believe me, we’ve tried to leave,’ said the Countess. ‘Every single bloomin’ day for what feels like a hundred years, we’ve tried.’

  ‘Can’t you attract the attention of a passing ship?’ said Geoffrey-Geoffrey.

  ‘One: there are no passing ships, and two: there’s no way of attracting them if there were,’ said the ex-King. ‘The only way to do so would be to start a fire, but everything here is constantly drenched by the endless waves.’

  ‘And now there’s all this wretched hail,’ said the Countess.

  As Geoffrey-Geoffrey looked up, a hailstone landed right in his mouth. Before he could spit it out, it melted and Geoffrey-Geoffrey felt himself go faint in the head. He sat down with a thud, reached out and caught a couple more hailstones and popped them in his mouth.

  ‘There is something freakish about this hail,’ he said. ‘It’s like a weird sort of ghost.’

  Countess Slab tasted the hail, but she had no feedback to offer. However, when Ex-King Quatorze tasted it, he went from a sickly green colour to a deathly shade of white, a white so bright that for a split second he looked like a tiny lighthouse on top of the rock.

  ‘The Hearse Whisperer,’ he said.

  ‘WHAT?’ said Geoffrey-Geoffrey.

  ‘The Hearse Whisperer,’ Ex-King Quatorze said. ‘This hail storm is the Hearse Whisperer.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Geoffrey-Geoffrey. ‘That’s my mother.’

  ‘The Hearse Whisperer is your mother?’ said the ex-King.

  Geoffrey-Geoffrey nodded. He didn’t know what to think or say. Nothing in his life up to that point had given him any training on how to react if you found you mother falling around you as tiny hailstones.

  ‘Oh, how touching,’ Countess Slab sneered. ‘A family reunion.’

  There were no buckets or bowls or mugs or jugs or basins or barrels or even plastic bags on Rockall. There was nothing at all to collect the Hearse Whisperer with as she fell around them, except a few empty scallop shells. The hail increased until it was falling as thick as a snowstorm and then suddenly stopped.

  Geoffrey-Geoffrey ran around pushing the piles of hailstones into all the dents in the rock. And then, as they melted, an amazing thing happened. The pools of melted Hearse Whisperer slid out of the smaller pools into bigger pools, where they merged together and when these pools were full, they slid into bigger pools and merged some more. They kept on doing this until they were all together in one large pool, the only large pool on Rockall.

  Gradually the liquid grew opaque and rose up out of the pool, until there in front of them was the Hearse Whisperer.

  Or rather, quite a lot of her.

  The hailstones that had missed Rockall and fallen into the sea were clearly gone, as were the few that Ex-King Quatorze and Geoffrey-Geoffrey had swallowed. So although there was enough of her to exist, she only had one ear and three fingers.

  And most of her teeth were missing. As well as her left knee.

  ‘Where am I?’ she said. ‘And when is the next train out of here?’

  ‘Mother,’ said Geoffrey-Geoffrey.

  ‘Mother? Mother?!’ said the Hearse Whisperer. ‘What are you talking about, you horrible little homunculus?’

  ‘It is I, your firstborn son, Geoffrey-Geoffrey.’

  ‘I have no children,’ said the Hearse Whisperer. ‘I demand a DNA test. Hold up your hand.’

  Geoffrey-Geoffrey did as he was told and instantly regretted it. The Hearse Whisperer bit his little finger off.

  ‘Blimey,’ she said as Geoffrey-Geoffrey fainted. ‘He is my son.’

  The Hearse Whisperer had as much maternal instinct as a bag of cement. Even a bottle of milk that’s gone off has more feeling for the bacteria growing in its curdled remains than she did for her long-lost child. Usually when a child and its parent are reunited after many, many years, past hurts and hardships are forgotten. Blood is thicker than water and all that sort of thing, and the deep bonds of family generally overlook, or at least forgive, all the bad memories.

  The Hearse Whisperer was not like this. Neither was Geoffrey-Geoffrey.

  Yes, he is my long-lost son, she thought, and I wish he still was long-lost.

  After all these years of loneliness I have found my long-lost mother, Geoffrey-Geoffrey thought, and now I would like to kill her.

  ‘My son,’ said the Hearse Whisperer, trying to pretend she cared as she wondered how long she would have to wait until she could lose him again.

  ‘Mother,’ said Geoffrey-Geoffrey, doing a pretty good impersonation of a loving son as he wondered how long he would have to wait before he could rip her head off.

  ‘Yes, yes, very touching,’ sneered Countess Slab. ‘But you can’t stay here. There’s barely enough room for the two of us.’

  Ex-King Quatorze took his wife to one side and explained who the Hearse Whisperer was. He told the Countess that she had been his chief spy and was just about the most evil being in the whole world. He suggested that if there was ever going to be any way the two of them could get off Rockall, the Hearse Whisperer could be the creature most likely to help them.

  ‘Well, I think they should go back to where they came from,’ said the Countess.

  ‘I was thinking that too,’ said Geoffrey-Geoffrey, who had happened to overhear their conversation. ‘Go back along the drain that brought me here.’

  ‘Drain?’
said the Hearse Whisperer. ‘There’s a drain?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course!’ cried Countess Slab. ‘We can escape this hell-hole at last.’

  ‘No,’ said Geoffrey-Geoffrey, ‘you can’t. You’re much too fat to fit in the drain.’

  He pointed at Ex-King Quatorze. ‘And so are you,’ he added.

  ‘Well, yes, OK, maybe,’ said the Ex-King. ‘You, my good and faithful servant, my dear old friend Hearse Whisperer, you can go and, as soon as you are free, you can bring back a boat to rescue us.’

  ‘And once we return to Transylvania Waters,’ he continued, ‘we will reclaim the throne, and you will be incredibly well rewarded.’

  ‘How well?’

  ‘Incredibly well.’

  ‘Can I have your daughter’s liver on toast?’ said the Hearse Whisperer.

  ‘Umm, er …’ Ex-King Quatorze began.

  Countess Slab gave him an enormous kick, and when he was then pulled out of the sea Quatorze said, ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘Then we will return with a boat and rescue you,’ said the Hearse Whisperer. ‘And if you do not keep your part of the bargain, it will be bits of you on toast, very, very delicate bits, and the rest of you will be kept alive to watch me eat them.’

  Geoffrey-Geoffrey squeezed himself back into the drain and was followed by his mother.

  ‘You go first,’ she had said, determined not to have her son behind her, where she couldn’t see what he was doing. ‘After all, you know the way.’

  ‘But there is only one way,’ Geoffrey-Geoffrey had said, very nervous to have his mother behind him, where he couldn’t see what she was doing.

  Either way it made no difference. It was so dark in the tunnel, neither of them could see anything.

  Unfortunately, Gruinard had just turned off her tracking equipment about thirty seconds before Geoffrey-Geoffrey squeezed back into the tunnel, so none of them knew he was on his way back.

  There was an alarm built into the system but, as luck would have it, an earthquake in Patagonia had sent a shockwave right around the world that had made a small crack appear in the Fruit-Pulp Pool drain, allowing several very hungry cockroaches into the drain. They wriggled through a small construction hole, which the builders should have sealed off but had forgotten to, and into the main wiring conduit that led across to Gruinard’s secret cellar of wonderful machines.

  And, of course, the first wire the cockroaches chewed through was the one that controlled the alarm.

  The second wire they wrecked was the one that controlled the Broken-Alarm-Safety-Backup-Alarm-alarm.

  So basically no one had the faintest idea that Geoffrey-Geoffrey and the Hearse Whisperer were on their way back up the drains.

  Being in total darkness, their progress was slow. Mother and son had to feel their way along, which meant poking their fingers into lots of things they were very glad they couldn’t see. Some of these unmentionable things made whimpering noises. Some growled. Some tried to bite their fingers off and all of them smelled slightly worse than a bucket of brussels sprouts that had been fermenting for a month in the bottom of the terrifying sewer that ran under the Diarrhoea Research Institute of Ghent.

  Actually, the sewer didn’t so much run as limp along very slowly, forever getting more and more stagnant. Even the Hearse Whisperer, who had seen it all, eaten it all, killed it all, torn all its limbs off and squashed it all,45 found it hard not to throw up. The accompanying fumes made her eyelashes melt and run down her face.

  Geoffrey-Geoffrey had lost his sense of smell in a small Belgian coffee shop one Saturday afternoon. He had reported the loss to the police and said that he’d had his sense of smell when he had gone into the cafe, but at some point he had lost it and no amount of searching could locate it.

  ‘I can only assume that someone stole it,’ he had said.

  Now, discovering how much his mother was suffering, he was rather glad he hadn’t found his sense of smell. But he too couldn’t ignore the fumes, which were melting his hair and making it run down his body to his feet so that his toes stuck together.

  All this hardship only made mother and son even more determined to get their revenge on the Floods.

  ‘We will make their lives so unbearable that they will wish they were dead, but instead of making them dead,’ the Hearse Whisperer said, ‘we will then make them feel better and all happy again and in love with the whole world. Then we will kill them.’

  ‘How will we do it, Mother?’ said Geoffrey-Geoffrey, realising that when it came to being evil, he still had so much to learn.

  I have always prided myself on my evilness, he thought, but next to my mother I am a mere amateur.

  He hadn’t changed his mind about taking revenge on his mother for how she had discarded him and ruined his life, but first he would make sure he learned every vile, cruel, heartless thing he could from her.

  Then I shall kill her, he thought, smiling to himself.

  Stupid child, thought the Hearse Whisperer. He thinks to pick my brain and take all the evil it has taken me years to perfect. He thinks then to kill me, but I shall be ready, and in the split second before he does it, I shall kill him and eat him on toast.

  Meanwhile, Nerlin and Quenelle had gone back down the path to her cave, although it had taken a lot of persuading to get him to leave the Valley of the Impossible Waterfall.

  Gruinard had let Nerlin mark out the place where he wanted to build his retirement cottage. It stood on its own around a bend in the river, set back from the water. Wildflowers in every colour of the rainbow grew there, among soft bushes and grass as lush as velvet. Nerlin couldn’t wait to dig it all up and build his cottage.

  ‘I will come back as soon as I can,’ he had said. ‘Once I have retired and young Valla is crowned King.’

  He wasn’t entirely convinced that his eldest son Valla would actually take the job, even though he was the heir to the throne. Of course if Nerlin were to die then Valla would have no choice, but Nerlin thought he probably wouldn’t enjoy living in a beautiful cottage up in the lovely valley quite so much if he were dead. At least, not as much as he would if he were alive.

  But I am the King, he thought. Which means I’m in charge, and if Valla won’t be King, then I’ll make a law saying the next one down can have the job, whether it be my son or my daughter. On the other hand, the next eldest is Satanella, but then my people might not like being ruled over by a small dog, and that would mean Merlinmary, who I think scares quite a lot of people, would be next in line.

  Nerlin had never thought that not being King anymore would be so complicated. Winchflat spent most of the time on some other planet full of strange inventions, so he wouldn’t want the job, and the twins would never be able to agree which one of them should wear the crown.

  ‘So that leaves Betty,’ he said. ‘And, actually, I think she’d probably be the best at it.’

  As he sat daydreaming about Betty’s coronation and what a great party they could have with exciting food that was kept for special occasions, including the legendary Poached Brussels Sprouts Dipped in Chocolate, someone touched him on the shoulder.

  It was Anorexya.

  ‘You look sad, Your Majesty,’ she said softly.

  Her hand stayed on Nerlin’s shoulder and he became aware of a strange tingling feeling running down his arm. A warm glow spread throughout his whole body, making him forget all thoughts of not being king and who might do the job when he retired. It was a weird but nice sensation that he hadn’t felt since he’d been a young man and it stirred long-forgotten feelings in a tiny room inside the back of his head.

  They were nice feelings, so nice, in fact, that he found it quite easy to forget all the other things he had been thinking about, like going home to his wife and children and castle, and making plans for his retirement, including popping in to Burnings, the famous Transylvania Waters hardware store, to collect some colour charts to help him decide what shade to paint the window frames on the idyllic cottage he was go
ing to build in the Valley of the Impossible Waterfall, where he and, um, er, Queen, er, what’s-her-name, um, were going to retire.

  He forgot all of that, even his beloved wife’s name and the earache he had just got from the wasp that had flown into his left ear.

  For, as Anorexya had put her hand on Nerlin’s shoulder, she had cast an Enchantment Spell46 over him, and he was now like putty in her hands, and not like the hard, lumpy bits of putty used to seal window panes, but soft, new putty that Anorexya could mould into whatever shape she wanted.

  She had but to suggest something, anything, and Nerlin would agree.

  Only a few hours earlier, Transylvania Waters’s poor King had been rescued from the Doolally Spell the evil Geoffrey-Geoffrey had cast on him that had made everyone think he was going senile. Now Anorexya had given him a new enchantment that had turned him into a labrador puppy. It’s not that Nerlin looked like a puppy – he was just all gooey and dopey, so, actually, he was more like a spaniel than a labrador.

  ‘You are not happy, are you, my beloved?’ Anorexya said softly.

  Nerlin, now freed from Geoffrey-Geoffrey’s Doolally Spell, had been quite happy with the promise of even being perfectly happy. He had been looking forward to going back to Dreary and into the arms of his loving family.

  But now he was bewitched, and being be witched by a witch is the strongest sort of bewitching, even more powerful than the combination of bacon and chocolate in a sandwich.

  He looked up at Anorexya with his googly eyes and said in a soppy, baby voice, ‘No, Nerlin is not happy. He has a sadness.’

  ‘Do not worry, my beloved. Your darling, your one true, lovely Anorexya is here to take care of you,’ said Anorexya. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We don’t want to go back to that nasty Dreary, where it’s all dark, and to that nasty Castle Twilight full of slime and damp, do we?’

  ‘No, we don’t want to go there,’ said Nerlin. ‘We would get covered in mould and slugs.’