You will eat a tall dark handsome piece of furniture.
There will be spaghetti out of a tin.
Belgium will stand on your other foot.
And a pair of knitting needles.
And the following Friday.
Awesome.
‘I think,’ said Winchflat, ‘these results prove that fortune-telling is absolute rubbish.’
He knew this already, yet there was something about the completely illogicality of it that made it irresistible. He’d decided to try just once more. He told himself that Maldegard Ankle would be the last fortune teller he would ever visit, which turned out to be an uncannily accurate prediction.
The more she looked at Winchflat, the less Maldegard Ankle could contain herself – which, when you look as if your body is on inside out, can be very dangerous.
Be still my heart, she told herself, terrified that the love of her life would leave her life forever a mere two minutes after entering it.
‘I think you underestimate yourself,’ she said. ‘In fact, I would say you are sort of, um, er, I mean…’
‘Oh what the hell…’ she cried and threw herself across the table at Winchflat. ‘You are the most handsome wizard I have ever seen in my life and yes, you will find true love. In fact you just HAVE!’
She landed on top of Winchflat, knocking his chair backwards so the two of them crashed to the floor with an almighty crash.
Several things happened:
Winchflat was knocked unconscious.
The force of the crash turned Maldegard Ankle’s body outside in.
Maldegard Ankle fainted.
Four cockroaches who had been sitting under Winchflat’s chair were squashed flat.
In a remote Belgian forest a tree fell over, but as no one to saw it, it didn’t make a sound.
The person who had been sitting in the tree with his eyes shut heard nothing, but bruised his elbow and an apple he had been holding in his right hand when he fell out of the falling tree.
He never ate apples again because they were just too confusing. This was because he had read about a famous scientist discovering gravity when an apple fell out of a tree onto his head. Now that he had fallen out of a tree onto an apple, he wondered if he had discovered anti-gravity. From that day on, just to be on the safe side, he stuck to eating bananas.
Luckily, as this is supposed to be a children’s book, the table was covered with a HUGE and REALLY THICK table cloth, more of a carpet really, and this had landed between Winchflat and Maldegard Ankle so that NO BITS of their bodies were touching each other.29
One of the oldest laws in Transylvania Waters states, with no exceptions, that if a fortune teller lands on top of you, then you have to marry them. Winchflat had no problem with this. He woke up to find his aching head cradled in Maldegard Ankle’s lap as she bathed his forehead with a warm cabbage poultice wrapped in one of her socks. He was relieved to see that neither he nor Maldegard Ankle were naked any more. He was wearing his clothes and Maldegard was clad in the traditional Transylvania Waters I’m-Marrying-A-Prince gown that she had owned since she was fifteen and never really believed she would get to wear. She was delighted to discover that it still fitted.
It turned out that not only had Maldegard Ankle looked as if her body was inside out, it actually had been turned inside out by an evil spell when she had been a baby – something to do with an unpaid window-cleaning bill, which itself was strange as her parents’ house had not had any windows. And now that the fall had turned her outside in again, she was stunningly gorgeous in the same way as Winchflat was. In fact, they looked so alike they could have been taken for brother and sister or even reflections of each other if they could have looked in a mirror without cracking it.
Maldegard Ankle panicked. She had not seen her right-way-round body and assumed that Winchflat would now run away extremely fast in all directions, but he didn’t. He was convinced that he was dreaming. All those months and years of teenage anguish, worrying about his acne – was it a nice colour, was there enough of it – unhappy years with no one to love him, had vanished in an instant.
This was truly a case of love at first fright. The two of them thanked their lucky stars that love was indeed blind.
‘I suppose we’d better get up,’ said Maldegard Ankle.
‘Why?’ said Winchflat, unable to believe he’d just said it.
Maldegard Ankle put up the ‘Closed for Lunch’ sign, even though it was only half past ten. Then, for modesty’s sake Maldegard Ankle put up another sign which said ‘Clothed for Lunch’ and the two of them went into the back room for hours of looking into each other’s eyes, talking about the future and playing Winchflat’s favourite game, a really, really complicated game of Electronic Scrabble when any word connected with computer-type stuff got a double score.30
‘By the way,’ Maldegard added, ‘I forgot to tell you your fortune. You will win the Nobel Prize for Science, first prize in the Self-Portrait Created Entirely From Cabbage Leaves competition, a holiday for two in the biggest electronics factory in Belgium and two boxes of cornflakes a week for a year.’
‘And a wife,’ Winchflat whispered in a romantic voice he had been keeping for just such an occasion.
Mordonna’s suggestion that the whole family stayed in the background throughout the Being Transylvania Waters Beauty Pageant lasted about thirteen seconds and it was Mordonna herself who was the first to enter an event.
Although she was normally as modest as any stunningly beautiful, brilliantly talented witch who also happens to be a princess, Mordonna’s weakness was her eyes. Everyone said they were the most incredible eyes they had ever seen and Mordonna had to agree. They were wonderful and had the power to hypnotise anyone who looked into them. In fact, Mordonna had once stared into a mirror for a bit too long and actually hypnotised herself.
So when she saw a poster announcing a Most Beautiful Eyes Contest, there was no way she couldn’t enter.
‘But it’s probably a trap,’ said Nerlin. ‘Your father would know about your eyes and he’d realise you wouldn’t be able to resist such an event.’
‘He’d be right, I can’t,’ said Mordonna. ‘So I have decided that it’s not a trap.’
‘But…’ Nerlin said, but there was no changing Mordonna’s mind.
‘It is not a trap,’ she said, ‘but that is.’
She pointed at a really bad drawing of Betty done in crayon, underneath which there were the words:
King Quatorze was much too stupid to even think of setting traps, never mind being able to organise them. So the Most Beautiful Eyes Contest wasn’t a trap, but the princess one was. It had been set by the kitchen boy who had met Betty when she had come down and trapped the Countess. He had, quite naturally, fallen deeply in love with Betty and the contest was the only way he could think of to get to see her again.
‘Of course it’s a trap,’ said Betty. ‘And I have every intention of walking right into it.’ She was thinking how totally cool she would be if it was a trap and she manage to trap the King too.
‘You will not, young lady,’ said Mordonna. ‘Just because you did some magic that actually worked and trapped my father’s horrible new wife, don’t think your magic will work properly next time.’
‘Well, if you are entering the Most Beautiful Eyes Contest,’ said Betty, ‘then I am entering the Blonde Princess Look-alike Contest.’
‘Betty Flood, go to your room right now,’ Mordonna snapped.
‘Umm, no can do, Mother.’
‘What! How dare you answer me back!’ said Mordonna.
‘I’m not,’ said Betty. ‘What I’m saying is that I haven’t actually got a room. Remember? We came here in a van and my old room in Acacia Avenue is toast.’
Before Mordonna could say another word, Betty ran off towards the back of the castle where the dungeons were.
The door down into the dungeons, which was normally bolted and barred, was standing wide open. There was a note, also written in
crayon, pointing into the darkness:
Without a moment’s hesitation Betty followed it.
She reached dungeon 37 and walked inside.
The King was not there.
There were, however, thirteen blonde girls all about Betty’s age.
‘Well, you needn’t bother,’ sneered one of them. ‘We’re all much prettier than you.’
Actually, none of them were, which, considering Mordonna had created Betty to look like a normal pretty human girl and the others were all Transylvanians, was not surprising.
‘And are you princesses too?’ said Betty.
‘Of course not, stupid,’ said the girl. ‘You don’t have to be a real princess. If you win you just get called one. I mean, a beauty queen’s not, like, a real queen, is she, duh?’
‘But I am a real princess,’ said Betty, clicking her fingers behind her back, ‘and I haven’t got big oozy zits like all of you.’
The thirteen girls all pulled mirrors out of their pockets31 and looked at their faces. Betty was right, they had terrible spots. They only managed a quick glance because all thirteen of them burst into tears and everything became a blur.
‘Did I mention that I’m a witch too?’ said Betty.
The kitchen boy, who had been hiding in the corner behind a chair, waited until the thirteen crying girls had fled and then came out.
‘Oh, hello,’ said Betty. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I, umm, err,’ said the boy, blushing, ‘I, umm, organised the contest so I could see you again.’
‘Oh,’ said Betty. ‘Why?’
‘Fate brought us together,’ said the kitchen boy. ‘It was meant to be.’32
‘Get real,’ said Betty.
‘But … it is our destiny,’ said the kitchen boy.
‘Yeah right.’
‘If you will not be mine, I will end it all,’ said the broken-hearted boy. ‘I don’t want to live.’
‘OK. Fair enough.’
‘You will be my true love?’
‘No, I’ll go and get you some poison,’ said Betty.
Meanwhile, Mordonna had entered the Most Beautiful Eyes Contest. When she had been young and living in Transylvania Waters, the King had never let her out of the Castle grounds. She had spent every moment of her life behind the tall stone walls so only the servants who lived in Castle Twilight knew what she looked like. In fact, only one or two of them did, because the King had made it punishable by casseroling to look at his beautiful daughter. Nevertheless, the beauty of her eyes had become so legendary that when Mordonna stood on the stage and took off her sunglasses, everyone realised the rumours about the Floods returning were true and they were looking at none other than Princess Mordonna Flood. The thought of her becoming Queen and Nerlin the rightful King filled the audience with a feeling of overwhelming happiness. The feeling poured out of the Beautiful Eyes Tent and spread through the town. It travelled out of the town to every part of the valley until almost everyone was incredibly happy, even the hedgehogs. Everyone was also very confused because most of them didn’t know why they were happy. They just knew in their hearts that something wonderful was going to happen.
Not surprisingly, Mordonna won first, second and third places. She also won fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth places because her eyes were just so staggeringly beautiful. Seventh place was won by Maldegard Ankle, and as Winchflat had told his mother the good news that he and Maldegard were engaged to be married, Mordonna was happy to hand seventh place to her.
‘Can you just imagine,’ said Mordonna to Maldegard, ‘when my genes and yours combine, how indescribable your children’s eyes will be. No one will be able to resist their power and even the darkest sunglasses will be unable to hide their incredibleness.’
The Flood children tried to get Nerlin to enter the Most Handsome Wizard Contest, but he was too shy, so it was won for the eighty-fifth year in a row by Forecourt de Vere-Sidcup, Transylvania Waters’ only male model. His face could be seen advertising everything from skeleton polish to cabbage soufflés to drawing pins and skinclips.33
The twins, Morbid and Silent, entered the Look-alike Look-alike competition which of course they won. You were supposed to look like someone else in the way some people look like their dogs and some people look like furniture and some people look like garden gnomes.34 But when the organisers wrote the rules they forgot to say that identical twins couldn’t enter. This was because there is no such thing as twins in Transylvania Waters. Morbid and Silent were the first two. No one had ever even heard of twins and when people saw them for the first time, they usually went and had a lie down thinking they must be drunk on cabbage wine and seeing double.
As everyone else in the family was entering things, Satanella and Brastof did go in Most Unusual Place You Have Ever Put A Red Rubber Ball and they won first prize. Initially they were awarded second prize, but when they showed the judges that they had actually put their ball in an unmentionable place in the person who had been awarded first prize, they were made the winners. The person who had won the prize to start with wanted to make an objection, but he couldn’t stop his eyes watering long enough to fill out the complaints form.
Valla and Winchflat decided not to enter anything, Valla because he was too busy preparing to become a dad and Winchflat because he was too busy preparing to get married. Nevertheless, they were both given first prizes in two entirely new categories: Preparing To Become A Father and Preparing To Get Married, because everyone was so incredibly happy that the Floods had returned they wanted all of them to have a prize.
Nerlin was awarded the Wizard Most Likely To Become King Very Soon Medal. There was some talk of keeping this very, very secret in case King Quatorze – or Silly Old Fool Most Likely To Stop Being King Very Soon, as he was becoming known – found out that the Floods were back, but everyone realised that 100 Quatorzes equals 1 Nerlin in terms of magical powers and there was only 1 Quatorze, so even if he did find out it wouldn’t change the future at all.
While the country was enjoying the pageant, the Countess Slab was stuck in the doorway down in the kitchens for three days. Finally King Quatorze reluctantly decided he ought to go and see if he could prise her free. However, with her trapped as she was, he’d realised that he was now much happier than he had been since the day they had first met, when he’d been visiting a small sausage farm in Bavaria and the Countess had fallen off a pig and landed on him.
Actually, I might have that the wrong way round, he thought. The pig might have fallen off the Countess.
This sudden thought made him realise that he might have got everything the wrong way round and actually fallen in love with the pig, but taken the Countess home by mistake.
It’s the sort of mistake anyone could make, he thought.
It was Thursday, which made the King even more bad-tempered. Thursday was his favourite day of the week, because Thursday was Kitten Knitting Day.35 All week he looked forward to their pathetic mewing – he even had a CD of it to play the other six days of the week – and now he’d have to give it a miss.
‘I suppose I could knit kittens tomorrow,’ he said to himself, ‘but Friday’s when I go round the town spitting at babies and if I missed that my subjects might think I’m getting soft. Oh God it’s hard being a tyrant.’
But lots of fun, he thought.
Though the fun didn’t seem quite as great as it used to. Sure, the kitties and the babies cried out as much as ever, but it didn’t satisfy him like in the old days. He’d experimented with taking a mouthful of lemon juice before spitting in the babies’ eyes and that had helped for a while, but even that had lost its edge.
Although Castle Twilight was very large, the Countess’s shouting and swearing could be heard everywhere, even outside in the town, and it was giving the King a terrible headache.
‘Though now I come to think of it,’ he said, ‘I’ve had a terrible headache since the day we met.’
Then he went into a very small soundproof roo
m, locked the door behind him and said, very quietly and pathetically so no one could hear him, ‘I wish I was dead.’ He was the King, for goodness sake! He was supposed to be happier than everyone else, but he realised that everyone else was probably happier than he was, even the Countess.
‘He’s just wished he was dead,’ said Winchflat to his family. He was listening in on his Even-Hear-A-Pin-Drop-Machine.
‘Dead? Not likely,’ said Queen Scratchrot. ‘He’s not getting off that lightly.’
The Countess Slab’s terrible roaring created a rumour in the town that the ancient legend of the Giant Kraken Worm had finally come true and it had burst up from the bowels of the earth and was now eating its way through everyone inside the castle walls before smashing down the walls and squashing everyone in their beds. A lot of people refused to go to bed, just in case the rumour was true.
‘So it was foretold, by the ancient ones,’ old crones were heard to say, though when they were asked to explain what that meant they all went rather quiet and did a lot of that dribbly muttering no one can understand that old ladies are so good at. The dribbly muttering would always end up with a knowing wink and a nod and a ‘See if it don’t’.
But the kitchen boy, who had decided that he probably wouldn’t end it all for now, just in case Betty changed her mind, told seven people down in the town what was actually making the roaring noise, and those seven each told seven others and in no time at all the whole population knew that the King’s fat wife had been trapped in a doorway by Betty.
‘So it was foretold, by the ancient ones,’ old crones said again, though this time when they were asked to explain, they said that it meant the vague rumour about Merlin’s descendant – i.e. Nerlin – coming back to reclaim the throne, maybe, perhaps, possibly was actually true. Then they did some more of the dribbly muttering that no one could understand and went home and hid under their beds in case they were wrong, but then they lay there all night too scared to move in case the Giant Kraken Worm came and sat on them.
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