Floods 12

by Colin Thompson

  All in all, the delays and interruptions wasted two days, neither of which were a Friday, so they still had no batteries. By then, Quenelle had been fitted with her vacuum mask that had been sent up to her by carrier goose, which is like a carrier pigeon but with a greater carrying capacity. Quenelle had then come down to Dreary and told Mordonna the little she knew.

  Winchflat put on a white coat and told Quenelle he was a doctor while he used a stethoscope to listen to her breathing.

  ‘I can assure you, dear lady,’ he said, ‘that you can remove your mask with absolute safety.’

  What he didn’t tell her was that the mask was a complete fake anyway.

  ‘Oooh, I feel quite heavy-headed,’ she said, and then told Mordonna about Anorexya.

  ‘So where does she come from?’ Mordonna asked. ‘It might give us a clue to where she is.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Quenelle. ‘She just appeared at our caves one morning.’

  ‘And she’s never told you anything about her past?’

  ‘No, not a single word.’

  ‘Didn’t you think that was odd?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Well, yes, but then most of us Old Crones have secrets from our pasts that we keep to ourselves,’ Quenelle explained. ‘It’s an unwritten rule that we never ask each other about our pasts. Of course, some of us are only too happy to talk about our previous lives, but others, like Anorexya, keep everything hidden away.’

  She showed everyone her list of the most likely places Anorexya might have taken Nerlin. Phone calls were made, texts and emails sent, but they all came up blank, even Tristan da Cunha, which Mordonna thought the most likely.

  Eventually, someone found two batteries and they all sat around Winchflat’s Dad-Tracker.

  ‘According to this,’ Winchflat said, ‘Father is gliding across a huge open ocean, kilometres from anywhere.’

  ‘So they’re still travelling in the balloon then,’ said Betty.

  ‘That’s what I thought, but then Father rose into the air before diving beneath the waves and catching a mackerel,’ said Winchflat. ‘In fact, he keeps doing it. I reckon he’s swallowed about twenty-five of them.’

  He consulted an app on his wPhone52 called the iFish-Capacity-Ometer, which told him that an adult male wizard could eat no more than four mackerel and the only creature living where the Dad-Tracker sensor currently was would be an albatross.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Mordonna cried. ‘My beloved husband has been swallowed by an albatross.’

  ‘That’s just physically impossible, Mother,’ said Winchflat. ‘No, it means that the sensor and Father have parted ways, and whoever removed it has fed it to the giant bird.’

  ‘Do you mean they’ve cut my darling open?’ Mordonna cried.

  ‘Well, yes, but it’s a really tiny device,’ said Winchflat. ‘It would only be a very small cut. What intrigues me, though, is who might have done it. There are very few people in the world who would have the technical ability to detect such a sensor.’

  ‘How many people?’ said Betty.

  Winchflat thought about it. Several times he held up his hand as though he had come up with an answer, only to put it down again a minute later.

  ‘Now that I think about it,’ he said, ‘there is only one person. He is the evil twin of my old friend Professor Nylon Strabismus, and his name is Dr Atrocius Strabismus. He is the only person who would have the skills to do such a thing.’

  ‘OK, so where do we find him?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Well, like all evil mad scientists, he lives in a remote mountain-top retreat in Austria,’ said Winchflat. ‘I will call his brother and see if he knows where he is.’

  Mordonna had a strong feeling that she knew where Nerlin had been taken. She decided to wait and see what Professor Strabismus told them before she said anything, because it was such a secret place that less than a dozen people who didn’t live there knew about. It was so secret that quite a lot of people who did live there didn’t even know about it.

  Shangrila Lakes.

  She didn’t know why, but the feeling that Nerlin had been taken there grew stronger and stronger.

  When Winchflat got hold of the professor, he couldn’t tell them where his brother had gone.

  ‘But I am know zat he haf avay gone no milks for now,’ the professor said, which is Austrian for, ‘But I do know he’s gone away because he has stopped the milk.’

  However, he did suggest that extracting some DNA from Anorexya’s clothes might give them a clue, and sure enough a pair of her old bloomers, which Winchflat put in his Jeans-n-Genes Scanner, showed that she came from a very ancient and obscure family that drew a complete blank when he searched for it on his database.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ he said.

  ‘What does the scanner say?’ Mordonna asked.

  ‘SL000 type 0001,’ Winchflat replied. ‘Which indicates that it’s from several million years before the records began. If I wasn’t seeing the numbers in front of me, I would say that they were impossible.’

  ‘SL000?’ said Mordonna. ‘I’m pretty sure I know what that means, and if I’m right, then I know where your father has been taken.’

  ‘Really?’ said Winchflat, seriously impressed that his mother might have some scientific information he knew nothing about.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mordonna. ‘SL – Shangrila Lakes.’

  ‘It sounds like a retirement village,’ said Betty.

  ‘It’s a country.’

  Winchflat typed and googled and typed some more, but nothing came up.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘There’s not a single mention of it anywhere on the net.’

  ‘No,’ said Mordonna, ‘nor will you find it anywhere in any book. It’s sort of like here, only much, much smaller. It was where a branch of our family called the Creaks set up a new kingdom several hundred years ago, when they thought Transylvania Waters was getting far too friendly with the world of humans and they were worried that our magical powers would get diluted by them.’

  ‘So how come you’re the only person who knows about it?’ said Betty.

  ‘Because they have a Perpetual Secrecy Spell, which blankets the world so no one can ever find them,’ Mordonna explained. ‘The only reason I found out about it is because when I was very young they tried to persuade me to go live there and marry my fifty-fourth cousin, who was the heir to the Shangrila Lakes throne.’

  ‘But what makes you think our father is there?’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Well, if the DNA test shows that Anorexya comes from there, then I reckon it would be the perfect place for her to take him,’ said Mordonna. ‘After all, no one knows where it actually is.’

  Now in the same way a tiny event had shown everyone that Nerlin had been taken away in a balloon, another tiny event came to them as a clue to where Shangrila Lakes might be.

  As the balloon had flown over Quicklime College, Nerlin had coughed and twitched in his sleep. His feet had shot up in the air and, before Anorexya could grab it, his left boot had slipped off his foot and fallen through the clouds, landing on a small boy called Phoebus Sandal, the youngest son of the famous wizard family the Sandals of Trembleton. It just so happened that the Sandal family were owners of Transylvania Waters’s finest and only vineyard, famous throughout wizardom for its Cabinet-Savage-Blank wine, a wine that was so powerful two glasses could make you forget, umm, er, whatsit.

  The boot had knocked poor Phoebus unconscious, though when it was realised that the boot had belonged to King Nerlin, it was considered a great honour. An email was sent from Quicklime College to Castle Twilight, asking Nerlin if he wanted his boot back.

  Within two hours Mordonna had organised the Quicklime’s dragon school bus to pick up the Floods from Transylvania Waters and whisk them around the world to the college, where Winchflat had fed all the available information into his laptop and calculated from the direction and angle of the boot’s trajectory which way the balloon must have been flying.

&n
bsp; ‘But there’s nothing there,’ said everyone at the college. ‘It’s just endless lines of valleys and mountains buried in ice and snow. Nothing lives there except vultures, and they’re half-starved most of the time.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a secret cave buried deep in one of the mountains,’ said Winchflat, though when he went to the far end of Quicklime’s valley and scanned as far ahead as he could, there was no evidence of anything, except for the ice, snow, three emaciated vultures, and the long-lost wreckage of a plane full of Belgian geography teachers, who even the vultures had refused to eat.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ Winchflat reported. ‘We’ve been led on a wild-boot chase. We might as well go home.’

  But then a report came from a fourth vulture, which had been found unconscious in the next valley with Nerlin’s other boot lying beside him. When the vulture was carried back to the school and revived, it spoke of a large balloon flying high overhead.

  ‘Heading west, it was,’ said the vulture, ‘and when I flew up to investigate, someone threw that boot at me.’

  ‘Did you see who was in the balloon?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘No,’ the vulture replied. ‘The boot hit me on the head when I was about twenty metres below the basket, so all I saw were stars and the ground coming up very fast. Then I passed out.’

  The scraggy bird was given a very dead and very fat rat, as well as a warm cup of blood and woodlice, before it was sent happily on its way.

  ‘But there’s nothing there,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Maybe your equipment is faulty,’ Betty suggested, but Winchflat insisted he had tested, checked and double-checked it all and everything was working fine.

  ‘It’s the Perpetual Secrecy Spell,’ said Mordonna. ‘It’s like an invisible lead cloak that hides the country from the world. I’ve never been there, so I don’t know for certain what it’s like, but I was told that the place was like a miniature version of Transylvania Waters.’

  ‘So, what you’re saying is that in one of the hundreds of snow-filled frozen valleys between here and the sea, hidden beneath this spell, is Shangrila Lakes?’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘You’re absolutely sure of that?’

  ‘No, but have you got any other ideas?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘They could have gone on beyond South America,’ said Winchflat. ‘They could be on the Galapagos Islands.’

  ‘No, too many people,’ said Mordonna. ‘And our agent there says no one new has arrived for over a fortnight.’

  ‘OK,’ said Winchflat. ‘Let’s assume you’re right. How do we find out which is the right valley? There are hundreds of them.’

  They wrote down their options, which included:

  Melt all the ice and snow in every valley. The only trouble was that this would probably flood millions of people’s homes all around the world due to the rise in sea level, and Shangrila Lakes would still be hidden by the Perpetual Secrecy Spell.

  Try to reverse the spell, and then use that to create a We Can See You Spell. The trouble with this one was that it could take forever to do, seeing as they had no idea how the Perpetual Secrecy Spell had been created in the first place. All they knew was that it was perpetual and that it was full of secrecy and that it was a spell.

  Create a machine that could detect heartbeats even through a Perpetual Secrecy Spell. The problem with this was that the machine would need to be so powerful that it would pick up the heartbeats of every ant and every worm in every valley.

  ‘Well, I’m stumped,’ said Winchflat, feeling quite upset that he couldn’t think of a way to bypass or neutralise the spell.

  ‘There is another solution,’ said Betty.

  ‘I don’t think there is, little sister,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Money,’ said Betty. ‘Just let it be known that we will pay a huge reward for the GPS co-ordinates of Shangrila Lakes.’

  Even Winchflat agreed that was a great idea. Within an hour the reward was being advertised on every wizard bulletin board and blog around the world, and within one hour and one minute, emails were pouring in.

  Still certain that Shangrila Lakes was somewhere beyond Quicklime College in deepest Patagonia, the Floods set up camp at the school. Winchflat created a quick computer program to analyse and correlate the emails.

  Most of the messages were just guesses, some ridiculous, some rude, and most were wildly inaccurate. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of them had come from people who had never heard of Shangrila Lakes, with many just saying outright that there was no such place.

  Winchflat’s soft ware worked in both directions and everyone who sent a nasty email discovered that the computer and/or mobile they had used to send the message was suddenly able to do an incredible impersonation of a small bonfire. Lots of things all over the world caught fire, not just phones and computers, but in some cases, the houses, cars and trouser pockets they had been stored in were set ablaze too.

  Naturally, several paranoid governments claimed the fires were due to dangerous terrorists and began wasting yet even more money on pointless and useless things they called ‘Security Measures’. Winchflat had guessed this would happen and his computer program made sure that the ‘Security Measures’ caught on fire too.

  By the time the word had got around and people had stopped sending in emails, Winchflat had saved three that actually looked as if they could be useful.

  The first one was from someone who’d said his father’s uncle’s best friend had run a delivery service, and had delivered twelve kilos of treacle toffee to an old wizard living in a place called Shangrila Lakes in 1923. He thought that the postal address might still be in the glove box of the delivery van. The trouble was that when his father’s uncle’s best friend had died in 1957, he had been buried in the delivery van in a graveyard somewhere near Stockholm, which was now the site of a twenty-seven-storey block of flats. Winchflat put this email at the bottom of the pile of three.

  The second one was from someone who’d said his mother’s aunt’s niece had run a delivery service, and in 1925 and again in 1926 and 1927 she’d delivered twelve kilos of treacle toffee to an old wizard living in a place called Shangrila Lakes. Apparently she had got the job when the previous delivery service had put their prices up. He thought that the postal address might still be in the door pocket of the delivery van, which was now in a Delivery Van Museum on the ground floor of a twenty-seven-storey office block, allegedly built above an old graveyard in downtown Stockholm. Winchflat put this email on top of the first one.

  The third email was from Anorexya. It said, in very rude, sarcastic words, that there was no way they would ever find her because they were useless and obsolete and stupid, whereas she was brilliant and clever and getting more beautiful every minute, and anyway Nerlin was in love with her and never wanted to see Mordonna or any of his horrible, gross, stupid children again, and besides Transylvania Waters was rubbish and nowhere as incredible as Shangrila Lakes, which was the top wizard place in the entire universe, and once she and Nerlin were married and became King and Queen they would sell Transylvania Waters to Belgium for fifteen scents, and all the witches and wizards who lived there would have their powers removed by the Grand Council and be reduced to ordinary, useless humans who would have to spend the rest of their lives polishing turnips in the worst market in Brussels.

  ‘Grand Council?’ Mordonna texted. ‘What Grand Council?’

  ‘THE Grand Council,’ Anorexya texted back. ‘The one I am in charge of. The Grand Council that must be obeyed by everyone or else.’

  Just in case Anorexya had a bug in the room, which of course she didn’t, Winchflat wrote on a piece of paper for them to keep texting Anorexya while he tracked down the signal that would tell them where she was hiding.

  ‘Or else what?’ Mordonna texted.

  ‘You’ll see,’ texted Anorexya. ‘And don’t think you can keep texting me while that stupid so-called clever son of your tries to track my locati
on. Shangrila Lakes has a cloaking device that makes it undetectable.’

  ‘So you’re in Shangrila Lakes then?’ Mordonna wrote.

  ‘Umm, no, umm, of course not,’ Anorexya texted back while kicking herself.

  ‘And besides,’ Mordonna texted, ‘we know that your full name is Anorexya Disinfectant Creak and that you are the daughter of the king of Shangrila Lakes. So it seems very likely that’s where you are.’

  ‘You’re just full of hot air, stupid smelly hot air that stinks like it came out of a pig’s bottom,’ Betty texted. ‘And on top of that, Shangrila Lakes is rubbish. I’ve seen prettier rubbish dumps. And it’s tiny and we are going to come and turn everyone who lives there into small dogs with rotten teeth and bad breath.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Anorexya replied. ‘You and whose army?’

  ‘We don’t need an army,’ Betty texted. ‘The assistant gardener’s grandmother’s old dog Neephus could beat you up with one paw tied behind her back.’

  After two more minutes of backwards-and-forwards abuse, Winchflat gave a thumbs up. Betty called Anorexya a pig’s bum and turned off her mobile.

  ‘Shangrila Lakes is about eighty kilometres from here,’ said Winchflat. ‘If we use the dragon bus, we could get there in less than an hour.’

  ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ said Mordonna, ‘doesn’t Quicklime College have a class in building missiles?’

  ‘It does indeed,’ said Winchflat.

  They sent for Seldom Hairpeace, the school’s weapons master, and together he and Winchflat designed a special missile that would be sent to Shangrila Lakes ten minutes before dawn, to be followed by the school bus ten minutes later.

  Naturally, the missile was not designed to kill or maim.53 It took three hours to arm the missile, which was then fitted with a computer-controlled guidance system, and at a quarter to dawn, Betty lit the touchpaper. As the missile soared over the valleys and mountains, it left a trail of melted snow behind it, and once the missile was directly above Shangrila Lakes, it exploded with a massive bang that was heard right around the world.