‘But…’
‘It’s all right,’ said the genie. ‘You still have two wishes left. Use the first one to fill yourself with self-confidence and use the last one to forget you ever met me. That way we’ll both be OK.’
‘All right,’ said George, ‘but I’ll miss you. You’re the first real friend I’ve ever had. Even with my old mistress Queen Scratchrot there were times when we couldn’t stand each other. And she had really bony knees.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ said the genie. ‘I have to go. My lamp back in Shanghai is calling out to me.’
And with that the genie performed the two last wishes and vanished. George was about to wonder where she had gone, but because of the final wish, he couldn’t actually remember ever having met her or that she even existed. The last thing he could remember was tipping out some coal under a dark, gloomy sky in a field of dirty, wiry grass far, far from the land of his forefathers. Then there was a short blank bit and now he was alone in a heartbreakingly beautiful valley in the Himalayas with the scent of Transylvania Waters in his nose. He thought he should be confused and worried, but his current situation was a million times better than the coal mine. So he thought, Who cares? Then he ate some more perfect grass, drank some more perfect water and had another look at his perfect reflection before setting off down the narrow track toward the forest above Castle Twilight.
The Hearse Whisperer woke up the next morning frozen to the bone, partly because she had even less meat and muscle between her skin and bones than Valla, partly because she was now very, very old and partly because the nights in Transylvania Waters were very, very cold. It had been so cold that night that the Hearse Whisperer had icicles in her ears. As she was more closely related to lizards than humans she needed external heat to get herself moving. While she waited for the feeble sunshine to come through the yellow clouds and warm her up, she had no option but to lie perfectly still. All her life this had been her Achilles Heel,15 a secret she had been very careful to keep to herself. The few people who had found out had died very soon after they had found out.
But now she was old. Her awesome powers were not so much awesome now as awkward.
As she lay there fantasising about the flower shop she was planning to open and what colour she would paint the door and whether she would have wallpaper with daisies or poisonous red toadstools on it, Nerlin looked up at the turrets of Castle Twilight and saw her curled around a gargoyle. He nudged Mordonna and pointed up at the Hearse Whisperer.
‘She’s looks asleep,’ said Mordonna.
‘I heard a rumour many years ago,’ said Vessel, ‘that she has the blood of a lizard and cold weather makes her paralysed.’
‘Maybe we could catch her again,’ said Nerlin. ‘And make sure she doesn’t escape this time.’16
‘Let’s get Parsnip to go up and check if the rumour’s true,’ said Winchflat. ‘If it is, then I’ll make a device to keep her subdued for as long as we want.’
So he called the old bird back over the walkie-talkie and they gave him very detailed instructions on what to do.
‘Hey sleeping dude person,’ he said to the Hearse Whisperer as he landed on the edge of the turret.
He had landed as instructed in exactly the right spot to block as much of the weak sunshine as possible.
‘Moo…’ the Hearse Whisperer said, too feeble to add the ‘ve’ to the end of it.
‘Moo?’ said Parsnip. ‘Why you make cow wordz, sleeping dude person?’
‘Nnnnn…’
‘You doing game? Snipsnip give up. What animal go “Nnnnn”?’
The Hearse Whisperer summoned every last bit of energy she could and said, ‘No, move, need warmth make blood move.’
‘Oh, you cold-blooded?’
The Hearse Whisperer nodded.
‘OK, sleeping dude person,’ said Parsnip. ‘You wait there. Snipsnip go get you bot water hottle.’ And he flew back down.
‘Sleepy dude person being cold-blooded for sure,’ he said. ‘I say I get bot water hottle.’
‘Excellent,’ said Winchflat, vanishing into the camper van. ‘I’ll make her a special hot water bottle quite unlike any hot water bottle anyone has ever seen before.’
The hot water bottle looked like a hot water bottle. It smelled all horrible and rubbery like a hot water bottle, but it wasn’t so much filled with hot water as a solid lump of ice. After Winchflat had given him a You-Are-Much-Stronger-Than-You-Look Pill, Parsnip flew back to the Hearse Whisperer and dropped it into her arms. Before she could summon up the energy to throw it away, the cold seeped into her bones and she fell back into a torpid trance.
‘That’ll keep her there for a while,’ said Winchflat, ‘while we decide what to do with her.’
‘We could make her into ice-blocks,’ said Betty. ‘Chop her up into tiny bits with a sharp stick pushed into each one.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Merlinmary.
‘Risky,’ said Mordonna. ‘Suppose everyone who eats one gets infected with her evil. Remember the Belgian Geography Teacher Stew Plague of 1857? An entire town went insane, forcing each other to draw maps of complicated river deltas and memorise a list of all the islands in the South Seas.’
‘Much too risky,’ said the Queen, ‘though I’m very taken with the idea of poking lots of pointed sticks into her.’
So they climbed up the chimney and threw the Hearse Whisperer down onto the roof, apart from the bits of her skin that had frozen to the stonework.
‘Thank you,’ called a voice from above once they were all back down on the flat roof. ‘Good snack.’
It was the vulture, who was peeling the Hearse Whisperer’s skin off the chimney pot.
The chimney was carrying smoke up from the kitchens seven floors below and had given the Hearse Whisperer a lovely smoky bacon flavour, but without the salt.’17
To make sure the Hearse Whisperer didn’t thaw out and run away, Winchflat created a solar-powered deep freeze and they folded her up and packed her inside.
‘Spare foot here,’ Betty called up to the vulture. ‘Won’t fit in the fridge.’
‘Wow. That Hearse Whisperer is delicious,’ said the vulture after they told her whose foot it was. ‘Maybe I’ll become really evil.’
‘Oops,’ said Betty.
‘Hey, don’t worry,’ said the bird. ‘If I do I’ll use my evilness to do good.’
Not many people outside Transylvania Waters know the country even exists and, of those that do, virtually none of them know about the annual Being Transylvania Waters Beauty Pageant that is held there every year.18 It is one of the country’s top secrets, because everyone knows that if word got out and the rest of the world saw how staggeringly beautiful all the contestants were, they would cross the highest mountains to reach them.19 Transylvania Waters secret agents travel the world looking for outsiders who do know about the pageant. When they find them they poke out their eyes with a blunt stick, which makes it extremely difficult to cross very high mountains and pointless to attempt it because they wouldn’t be able to see the lovely contestants anyway.20
Unlike other beauty pageants where most of the contestants are air-heads who want to bring world peace by standing around in bikinis giggling inanely, the Being Transylvania Waters Beauty Pageant entrants are super-talented. Whereas the rest of the world has only one winner for each pageant, this contest is more like a cross between the Olympic Games and a Beauty Pageant. There are lots of different sections and therefore lots of winners.
Here is a list of some of the most popular sections:
Shiniest neck bolts.
Greatest percentage of the body covered in hair.
Largest pustules – this has several subsections based on the texture and colour of the pus oozing from them.21
Spotput, which is the furthest distance someone can squeeze a blackhead.
Rustiest neck bolts.
Most original cough.
Most extra bits – includes most fingers, most toes and other bits we c
an’t mention here – this is always VERY popular with the audience.
Largest lice.
Loveliest lice.
Most neck bolts.
Most necks.
This is just a small selection. There are so many sections that no matter how weird your tastes are, there would be a competition that you would want to enter.
Naturally the Flood children knew all about the pageant. They had spent many happy hours, as they grew up, sitting at Nerlin’s feet down in his shed while he told them about it. As he had lived in the drains, his view of the proceedings had been from a tiny periscope poked up through a grating, but nevertheless he had wonderful memories.
‘Of course, your mother, with her staggering beauty and brains, would have won dozens of medals,’ he always added at the end, except that Mordonna’s father, King Quatorze, had never allowed her to leave Castle Twilight’s gardens.
Nerlin had actually been in love once before he met Mordonna, but it had been an unrequited love from afar.
He had fallen head over heels22 in love with Miss Outrageous Body Modification 1968, but because he was trapped below ground they never met. In fact, the target of his love never even knew he existed, although he had poked a Purple Love Toadstool at her through the grating of his drain as she had passed by. She had not noticed Nerlin’s token of love and had accidentally trodden on it. Nerlin had been heartbroken as only a fourteen-year-old boy can be and vowed he would never fall in love again, as all fourteen-year-old boys do on a regular basis.
By a wonderful coincidence, the day the Floods arrived back in Transylvania Waters was the very first day of the Pageant. The opening ceremony had been the usual great success. All the fireworks repeatedly refused to light because of the dampness that covered the entire country. Even with the Official Turbo Flame Gun on full bore, the fireworks stayed as dead as ever. They had in fact been using the same fireworks for over fifty years. The acrobats that dropped from the top of the stadium had all broken their legs, as they did every year, because the dampness had rotted all their ropes and, as always, the fire engine refused to start because there was no petrol anywhere in Transylvania Waters. Finally, the Official Torch was carried into the stadium and placed in the cast iron Official Torch Holder, where it promptly spluttered and went out.
When they discovered there had been fifteen fewer deaths than the year before at the opening ceremony, the organisers apologised and added their own corpses by way of compensation.
The Pageant would last for a whole week and the Flood family agreed it would be the perfect time to go down into the town. The place would be packed with people from all over the country and they would not be noticed at all.
‘Can we enter?’ Merlinmary asked when she heard about the Most Body Hair category.
‘Well, that competition’s only open to girls, otherwise Furball McKenzie, who is even hairier than you, would win it every year,’ said Mordonna. ‘And as you know, none of us, including you, know if you’re a boy or a girl.’
‘That’s true,’ said Merlinmary. ‘Well, if there’s a Most Creative Use Of Electricity section maybe I could enter that. Though I am not parading in a bikini for anyone.’
‘Err, probably better if we just stay in the background,’ said Mordonna when Satanella and Brastof discovered there was a Most Unusual Place You Have Ever Put A Red Rubber Ball section.
The Beauty Pageant took over the whole town. Apart from all the contests, which were held in several venues, the streets were lined with market stalls selling exciting and exotic foods – Cabbage à la Belgique, Dagwood Cabbage, Cabbage and Earth Soufflé and Cabbage Soda. There were also souvenir stalls where you could buy exquisite hand-carved models of cabbages and cabbage leaf bookmarks.
There were sideshows such as the Cabbage Shy, Shoot the Cabbage and Guess the Weight of the Cabbage where you could win a cabbage a week for life.23
But without a doubt the most popular stalls were the fortune tellers. Being a land of witches and wizards, Transylvania Waters always had fortune tellers – they were down every street. But during Pageant Week, strange shamanistic fortune tellers came to town from their remote caves all over the country and all the fortunes were just that bit more optimistic. Instead of being run over by a team of runaway horses, you would get gently squashed to death by a very soft horse with big brown eyes who would make sure you were nice and comfortable before it sat on you. During Pageant Week lots of people had their fortunes told several times a day and then chose the one they liked best as the one they would believe in. There were special fortune tellers for your dog and one very strange one who would tell the fortune of your cabbage.24
Winchflat Flood was a big fan of fortune tellers. Considering he had such a scientific mind this was quite out of character. To believe in fortune-telling you need to be able to switch off all the intelligent bits of your brain and that was something that Winchflat never did. It was this that was the appeal. By visiting a fortune teller Winchflat felt he was crossing to the dark side and forcing his brain to live on the edge. Logic told him fortune-telling was all rubbish, while the wizard blood in his veins told him the opposite.
The Mysterious Madame Maldegard Ankle was not your average fortune teller. For a start she always insisted that her clients took off all their clothes.25 This was enough to make most people stay away. The few that didn’t mind being naked usually ran screaming out of her tent when they saw that she was naked too. Even clothed, Maldegard Ankle was not a pretty sight apart from her stunningly beautiful eyes, which were even brighter than Mordonna’s. The rest of her, however, was large, pink and soft, with more wrinkles than a whole nursing home full of old people even though she wasn’t particularly old. Quite simply, she looked as if she had her body on inside out.
Winchflat had grown up outside in the human world, where his appearance had had a similar effect on people to the effect Maldegard Ankle had on the population of Transylvania Waters. What Winchflat had not discovered yet was that here, in the land of his forepersons,26 he would be thought of as dashing, handsome even, and quite a catch for any young witch or goat or sheep or vampire bat.
‘You can’t judge a book by its cover,’ was something he said very often.
‘Yes you can,’ said the Queen, who read a lot. ‘Most of the time, anyway.’
‘Well, beauty is only skin deep,’ Winchflat would say.
‘Whereas ugly goes right through to your bones,’ Merlinmary answered.
When Winchflat had turned fifteen, he had decided being a teenager was too painful and difficult so he built himself a machine that made him thirty-nine years old. He would then stay thirty-nine for enough years until he caught up with himself. He had tried being thirty-four, but it didn’t fit properly. Thirty-seven had been almost right, but being thirty-nine was so perfect he thought he might stay that age forever. Of course, his brain had always been two hundred and seven because it was infected with extreme cleverness.
Unable to find a girlfriend in the human world, he had built himself one – Igorina.27 Parts of her had been thirty-nine too, but some bits had been twenty-three and her knees had been ninety-six. Even with a microscope and carbon dating Winchflat had never been able to tell how old her face was, or even what species parts of it came from.
‘When you’re building someone, you can’t just go down the shops and buy the bits,’ he had explained. ‘You have to take what you can get.’
Unfortunately Igorina had been turned to minute bits of toast and metal oxides when the Hearse Whisperer had destroyed the Floods’ home in Acacia Avenue. So Winchflat had decided to visit a fortune teller to find out if he would ever find true love.
‘Cross my palm with saliva,’ said Maldegard Ankle. ‘And I will read your fortune in my crystal ball.’
Winchflat spat in her hand and Maldegard Ankle sniffed it.
Due to cash flow problems Maldegard Ankle had been forced to pawn her crystal ball and was now using a cabbage. As she stared deep into its leaves she reali
sed that Winchflat was the only customer she had ever had who had not burst out laughing at this point. Still with her face hovering over the cabbage, she peeked at him out of the corner of her eye. He was, she thought, the most desirable thirty-nine-year-old man she had ever seen – not only handsome, but with a regal air about him.28
She felt her heart flutter, not the flutter she got from too much cabbage wine, but the flutter of love, a flutter she hadn’t felt since her pet slug Moriarty had died when she was twenty-one. She felt herself blushing and it was all she could do to speak without fainting.
‘Why have you come to see me?’ she managed to mumble.
‘I want to know if I will ever find true love,’ said Winchflat. ‘I know I am not handsome but…’
Winchflat had actually been to seventeen other fortune tellers that day, telling himself it was the scientific thing to do. He had asked them all the same question and got seventeen completely different answers.
‘I will take all of their predictions, feed them into a computer and then produce an average,’ he had explained to his mother. ‘Then, since the law of averages is very imprecise yet strangely appealing, I will do my utmost to believe the result.’
The computer had not been happy being fed mumbo jumbo. It had been unable to produce a single answer and had come up with some very strange results which appeared to have nothing to do with the data Winchflat had fed in. The results were:
You will meet a tall dark handsome piece of furniture.
There will be spaghetti.
Belgium will stand on your foot.
A non-racially-specific-coloured sheep will give you three bags of wool.
You will burn some toast next Thursday week.
Or something.
‘I must have typed something in wrong,’ said Winchflat and very carefully, one letter at a time, fed his seventeen predicted fortunes in again.
This time the computer was not only unhappy, but angry. The results were:
Listen, stupid, we’ve been through all this before.
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