Floods 8

by Colin Thompson

  The Countess’s bellowing had made most of the leaves fall off the trees. Large cracks were beginning to appear in the castle walls and all the paintings in the Castle lost their colour.

  Something had to be done.

  The King, who was terrified of Countess Slab and could never find an answer when he asked himself why he had married her in the first place, told his manservant to go down to the kitchens and see what could be done. The manservant was also terrified of the Countess so he told his manservant to go and sort it out and that manservant told his manservant and so on until there was no one else to tell. The last manservant, who was more terrified than all the others and had no one to pass the order on to, chose to go waterskiing in Lake Tarnish rather than face the Countess, so nothing happened.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to go myself,’ said the King on the fourth day, pausing for someone to offer to go in his place.

  But no one did.

  ‘Hello, my beloved,’ he said timidly as he walked through the kitchen towards the back end of his wife.

  ‘GR!!***&8¢¢KK*!’ screamed the Countess, followed by, ‘F@@#XXX!!!!£, Mackerel, Mackerel, Mackerel, Organiser!!!’

  ‘Now, now, dear, don’t worry,’ said the King. ‘We’ll soon have you out of there.’

  ‘KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL,’ roared Countess Slab.

  ‘Who, dear?’

  ‘The little blonde girl. All little blonde girls. All medium-size blonde girls. Anyone with blonde hair. Anyone whose hair is not blonde just in case they’ve dyed it. Kill everyone.’

  ‘Little blonde girl?’ said the King.

  ‘She said she was a princess, said her father was Nerlin, the true King of Transylvania Waters, and her mother was your own daughter.’

  The King turned white and began to shake like a big round white jelly that had been made in a mould shaped like a little podgy king.

  The Floods had returned.

  This was the day he had feared ever since his daughter and wife had fled Transylvania Waters with that young man from the drains. The old crones had told him this day would come. Even when he had boiled them in cabbage water they foretold it. So it was true, the man from the drains really was a descendant of Merlin.

  This was the day the Hearse Whisperer and the King’s other spies had been supposed to stop happening. Now his evil cronies and agents had all She had two things to decide too: (1) how she could get out of the wall, and (2) once out, how she could spend the rest of her life without the King in it.

  She knew she had made a really bad decision hooking up with the King, but she had to admit there hadn’t been anyone else to choose from. Sure, there had been a well-worn path of young men at her door, but they had all been running away. Even when her father had offered huge bribes, threats enemies as he had been and all he could think of was running away.

  This meant there were two things he had to decide: (1) where he could run to, and (2) whether he could manage to do it without taking the Countess with him.

  ‘I, err, umm,’ he spluttered as a million confused thoughts crashed round inside his brain.

  ‘What are you whinging about, you feeble cretin?’ the Countess snapped. ‘Get me out of here.’

  She had two things to decide too: (1) how she could get out of the wall, and (2) once out, how she could spend the rest of her life without the King in it.

  She knew she had made a really bad decision hooking up with the King, but she had to admit there hadn’t been anyone else to choose from. Sure, there had been a well-worn path of young men at her door, but they had all been running away. Even when her father had offered huge bribes, threats and magic spells, no one who had actually been breathing had wanted her. That is, until the short, stupid King of Transylvania Waters had come along. He was the Countess’s father’s dream – someone so stupid and greedy that he would have married a chicken for three cents and some shiny bits of plastic.

  The King sent for the castle stonemason, but as Betty had said, the wall was as hard as a diamond so no matter what tools the stonemason used to attack the wall, nothing happened. The stonemason sent for the quarry man, who exploded a large stick of dynamite, but all that did was burn the Countess’s eyebrows.36

  ‘You morons!’ the Countess bellowed. ‘If you don’t get me out of here at once I will have you thrown into Lake Tarnish!’

  But no matter what they did, the Countess remained stuck fast.

  When the cook suggested from a safe distance – she went to Belgium and sent a carrier pigeon with a message suggesting that maybe if the Countess was to go on a diet, she might lose enough weight to wriggle out of the doorway, the Countess fainted, but after she woke up, without admitting it was probably the only thing to do, she did start eating less. She cut breakfast down to only three cabbages, lunch down to four and dinner to eleven. And to everyone’s surprise, she cut out the two morning break and three afternoon break cabbages altogether.

  But it made no difference. Betty’s spell made sure that as the Countess shrank, so did the doorway.

  ‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ said the King. ‘We have to make the so-called princess reverse the spell.’

  ‘Well, send your spies out to find her,’ the Countess Slab demanded.

  ‘Umm, yes, of course, dear, right away,’ said the King, unable to admit that he didn’t actually have any spies left.

  He went back into his very small soundproof room, locked the door behind him again and said, very quietly and pathetically so no one could hear him, ‘No one loves me any more.’

  Even the two cockroaches hiding in the shadows nodded in agreement.

  ‘Though to be honest,’ one cockroach said to the other, ‘I don’t think anyone ever did.’

  ‘True,’ said the other. ‘They may have obeyed him out of fear and maybe even because they loved Queen Scratchrot, but you’re right, no one ever loved Quatorze.’37

  ‘It is said, by the old crones, that even his own armpits despise him,’ said the first cockroach.

  ‘My armpits do too, and to be despised by a cockroach’s armpit is about as loathed as it’s possible to be,’ said the other. ‘Though to be strictly accurate, us cockroaches don’t have arms, so we can’t have armpits.’

  ‘I was about to point that out,’ said the first cockroach.

  Cockroaches are extremely particular about things like that.

  ‘No, we have legs so that means we have legpits. So to recap for a moment, my legpits despise the King.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said another cockroach – hard to tell which one as they all look the same, even to each other.38 ‘And as we each have six legpits, we can hate the king three times as much as humans who only have two armpits.’

  ‘Well, actually, you could say that humans also have one legpit.’

  ‘I think we would all prefer not to say that.’

  Several other cockroaches, who had arrived while this conversation had been going on, all nodded. It was agreed that every single cockroach in Transylvania Waters hated the King right down to their six legpits.

  ‘If only we could let him know somehow,’ said the first cockroach. ‘I can’t bear to think of all that hatred going to waste.’

  Outside the Castle, Winchflat reported the King’s comment and the cockroaches’ conversation to the Queen and Auntie Mould. Then he pressed a button on his Even-Hear-A-Pin-Drop-Machine and put a thought inside the King’s head.

  ‘Everyone hates me,’ the King whimpered. ‘Even the cockroaches.’

  ‘Wow!’ said all the cockroaches. ‘Telepathy!’

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Auntie Mould after Winchflat told them the King’s response. ‘We’ll let him stew for a few more days then move on to Part Two of the Grand Plan.’

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed Queen Scratchrot. ‘Good idea. By the way, just remind me a
gain, Part Two, exactly what’s involved?’

  ‘Umm, well, I, err, thought, umm, you’d organised that.’

  ‘No, we agreed Part Two was your domain.’

  ‘There isn’t a Part Two, is there?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Or a Part One?’

  ‘Well, umm…’

  ‘There isn’t actually a Grand Plan, is there?’

  ‘Not as such, no,’ said the Queen.

  ‘OK,’ said Mordonna, taking charge. ‘Get me a pen and some paper. We’ll make a Grand Plan now.’

  It turned out that there was only one part to the Grand Plan and it was: Get Rid Of The King And His Gross New Wife.

  ‘I assume,’ said Mordonna to Betty, ‘that you can reverse the spell you put on the Countess?’

  ‘Reverse?’

  ‘Yes, so we can get her out of the doorway.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Betty.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that I haven’t actually thought about it,’ said Betty.

  ‘Well, maybe you could start thinking about it now, young lady. Spells have consequences, you know.’

  ‘OK.’

  Betty did some thinking, then a bit more thinking, and then said, ‘OK, I’ve finished thinking.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘No, I haven’t the faintest idea how to reverse it,’ Betty explained. ‘It all happened so quickly that I can’t remember what I did to trap her in the first place. I can remember clicking my fingers and there was a sort of flash of light, but after that my mind’s a blank.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Queen Scratchrot and Auntie Mould thought that was hilarious and came up with all sorts of silly suggestions of what could be done to get the Countess free. Their favourite was cutting her up with a chainsaw and, just for a laugh, putting the bits back together back to front so her bottom ended up just below her face.

  ‘Or we could set her on fire,’ said Queen Scratchrot. ‘I bet all that fat would burn really well.’

  ‘Stop it, stop it,’ Auntie Mould cried. ‘If I laugh any more I’ll wet myself. Oops.’

  The obvious solution – apart from the really, really obvious solution of getting Nerlin or Mordonna to do some magic, which no one had thought of – was to remove the entire wall with the Countess stuck in the doorway, and this what they decided to do. And because she was weighed down with fifty tons of stone there would be the added bonus of the Countess not being able to move fast enough, or at all even, to chase and hurt anyone.

  ‘And if she does fall on anyone,’ said the Queen, ‘it’ll just feel the same whether she’s stuck in a huge lump of rock or not.’

  ‘Stop it, stop it,’ Auntie Mould cried, tears of laughter pouring down her face. ‘Oops.’

  First they had to catch the King – but that would be easy. Every single day of his life at two o’clock in the afternoon he went to the toilet whether he needed to or not. That was not why he went. He went to read his secret magazines that he kept hidden under a loose floorboard. These were not rude magazines, but every single edition of What Cardigan magazine, which he had secretly smuggled in from outside, because King Quatorze was a cardigan addict, so much so that sometimes he wore three at once, though he always kept them hidden beneath his royal regalia. Even the teddy bear he took to bed each night had a little wardrobe of cardigans.

  So the next day, as the King sat on the lavatory enjoying the August 1967 edition of What Cardigan with its exciting feature on Famous Belgian Cardigans of History, Queen Scratchrot performed the legendary Flying Toilet Spell. Not just the toilet but the entire room rose silently into the air and headed west over Europe and out towards the Atlantic Ocean.

  At the same time, Auntie Mould performed the Flying Wall Spell and the kitchen wall containing Countess Slab rose up through the ceiling, out over the town, across Lake Tarnish, up over the mountain tops and followed the King out into the Atlantic. They flew unseen over Scotland, past the islands of the Hebrides and even past the remoteness of St Kilda.

  And then they began to descend towards a tiny desolate rock sticking out of the angry sea.

  Rockall.39

  All the while the terrified Countess had been screaming at the top of her voice, but the King was so deeply immersed in the beauty of an antique eighteenth-century cardigan from Bruges that he hadn’t even noticed he’d been moving. He lifted the secret floorboard, put the magazine back in its right place and opened the lavatory door.

  Then he realised something had happened. Where there should have been a dark castle corridor there was now a bit of sharp rock, lots of rain, angry waves and an even angrier huge screaming Countess stuck in a bit of wall.

  The screaming seemed like a good idea, so he joined in. Their combined screaming not only shattered all the limpet shells clinging to the rock below them, but it made the Countess’s bit of wall shatter too, proving that every cloud has a silver lining. It also proved that every silver lining has a cloud as the frantic wind blew a lot of shattered wall dust into Quatorze and the Countess’s eyes.

  ‘That all went well,’ said the Queen as they watched everything on their RockallCam.

  ‘Apart from the poor sheep,’ said Auntie Mould.

  The plan had included sending a very old smelly sheep to Rockall with the King and the Countess, but Rockall was so small the sheep had fallen off. Incredibly, it had actually survived due to all the grease in its wool keeping it afloat and the wind blowing in just the right direction to carry it back to Scotland, where it entered and won the Eurovision Song Contest.

  We shall return to Ex-King Quatorze and the Countess Slab later…

  As the genie had predicted, George the Donkey was a babe magnet. As he walked through the town towards Castle Twilight, the seven girl donkeys he passed swooned and went knock-kneed. Four of them had riders who fell off as the donkeys staggered around with stars in their eyes and the other three shed the loads of cabbages they had been carrying in convoy up to the castle kitchens. This caused a serious cabbage jam in the narrow alley they’d been walking down.

  ‘I saw him first,’ said all seven of the girl donkeys and a fight broke out.

  ‘Ladies, ladies, chill out,’ said George. ‘There’s enough George for everyone.’

  This demonstrated that a miserable complaining donkey is probably preferable to one who thinks he is Mr Wonderful.

  You know, George thought to himself as he remembered it had actually been Queen Scratchrot who had sold him to the coal miner all those years before, I don’t need the Queen. I am Mister Cool. If the Queen wants to see me, she can come looking.

  ‘Come on, ladies, we’re outta here.’

  And he walked back up the path through the forest to the heartbreakingly beautiful valley in the Himalayas followed by seven adoring girlfriends.

  ‘OK, ladies,’ said George when they got there, ‘we are all now going to live happily ever after. We will eat the perfect grass and drink the perfect water and I shall be known as George The Perfect and I name this valley Georgeland.’

  ‘Oh, George, you are so wise and so cool and so wonderful,’ said his seven not very bright girlfriends.

  They talked about setting up a sanctuary for unwanted humans, but the water in the stream was so cool and refreshing and the grass was so delicate and delicious and the cave where they slept at night was so cosy and warm that they agreed they’d talk about it tomorrow. The next day they decided that maybe they’d discuss it next week after they’d all had a good rest and some more perfect grass, and a week later agreed that looking after neglected humans was just too much trouble and they simply couldn’t be bothered.

  ‘Yeah, ladies,’ George said, summing up everyone’s feelings, ‘I think we just need some George-The-Great time.’

  They didn’t take a vote because donkeys can’t count, so they decided simply living happily ever after would do.

  Because hey (and hay), donkeys are like that.

  Within five minutes of th
e news of Transylvania Waters’ liberation spreading across the town, the ordinary people went from street to street ripping up all the drain covers and freeing the Dirt People, who had spent so long trapped beneath them. Hundreds of children had been born in the drains and had known no other world. Now they staggered around in the bright gloom rubbing their eyes in disbelief. So it was true, all those stories their parents had told them about ‘above’ had not been made up after all.

  Within thirty-five minutes of the news of Transylvania Waters’ liberation spreading across the town, twenty-seven people were being treated for broken legs from falling down open manholes.

  Within one day of the news of Transylvania Waters’ liberation spreading across the town, all the drain covers were put back, but with nice easy-open handles and no padlocks.

  Within two days of the news of Transylvania Waters’ liberation spreading across the entire country, seventeen people were being treated for broken ankles from tripping over the easy-open handles on the drains.

  As readers of all the seven earlier Floods books will have realised, Nerlin was never a wizard of any real talent. He was kind-hearted, well intentioned and a caring, loving husband and father for sure, but not a genius. With the banishment of the usurper King Quatorze, and the throne being returned to the rightful king of Transylvania Waters – Nerlin, descendant of Merlin – all that changed.

  Now that Quatorze was gone and the Dirt People who had been imprisoned down in the drains were free again and back above ground, all the spells King Quatorze’s evil witches had cast over them vanished. Not only had the King made the Dirt People forget their glorious past and how they were the rightful rulers of the land, he had also spread Hatred Spells on all those above ground to make them despise Merlin and his followers.

  Everyone above ground now felt so guilty at how they had treated the Dirt People that they showered them with gifts of hand-woven calico underpants and envelopes of pressed flowers, the second and third most prized gifts in the whole of Transylvania Waters.40