by Debi Gliori
“WhatEVER!” bawled Signora Strega-Borgia. “It’s only money. Right, my lambs, let’s get you out of harm’s way in the stable block, shall we?”
The beasts, quite accustomed to being addressed by a collective noun that more accurately described their favorite dinner, lined up obediently by their mistress’s side.
“I’ll have to ask you to keep those brutes under lock and key from now on,” said Mrs. Fforbes-Campbell, seizing this opportunity to make her opponent squirm. “They’re far too dangerous to be allowed anywhere near the hotel. . . .” She paused, struck by the sight of a familiar object lying abandoned on the gravel of the parking lot. “My bag! What’s it doing out here? Eughhh, where on earth has it been?”
On the verge of informing her that he’d once known her handbag to splash in the shallows of the Limpopo River, before it became a handbag, Tock found himself being firmly dragged out of earshot by his beloved mistress. Reading her expression, he gave a little honk of alarm.
“Not one word,” said Signora Strega-Borgia, leading the beasts into the chilly gloom of the stable block. “You’ve done enough damage to last a lifetime, Ffup. And you, Tock, what were you thinking of, burying that handbag then exhuming it again? Don’t you think that awful woman will work out that it was you who stole her bag? Yes, yes, I know that it was the decent thing to do, burying your old friend, but he’s long dead, well beyond the indignity of being a purse rather than a predator. . . .”
“’S not fair,” Knot complained, throwing himself down on a pile of dank straw. “I didn’t do anything. . . .”
“Nor I,” said Sab, picking his way carefully past little heaps of beast poo and crawling up a beam to his perch in the rafters. “This is a gross infringement of my griffinal liberties. I want to speak to my lawyer.”
“Shut up,” hissed Signora Strega-Borgia. “I’ll try to sneak out with some supper when the mob outside has stopped baying for your blood, but until then, you might have a think about how we’re supposed to compensate Mr. Pylum-Haight for the loss of his car and find a new home to fit all of us, when all we can afford is a small bungalow.”
“But . . . aren’t we going home soon?” Ffup said. “Back to our dungeon and our lovely lochside?”
“No, we are not,” said Signora Strega-Borgia. “We are never going home again. StregaSchloss is ruined. From now on, we’re going to live normally, in a little house with two garages, a garden shed, and a vegetable patch and garden that would probably fit into the larder at StregaSchloss. And when we look out of our windows, all that we’ll be able to see is thousands of houses just like ours. Won’t that be nice?”
“Waughhhhh!” howled Tock, burying his snout in a pile of straw. “I bet crocs aren’t allowed anywhere near there.”
“Can’t imagine dragons would be too popular, either,” said Ffup, his wings drooping in dejection.
“I could always turn myself back to stone and be your garden statue. Stone griffins are all the rage now,” said Sab, desperately clutching at straws.
“And me,” added Knot. “I’ll be . . . um . . .” His yeti’s imagination failed him utterly.
“The doormat,” said Signora Strega-Borgia, stifling a sob. “You can be the unhygienic doormat, pet.” Unable to continue without bursting into tears, she waved a goodbye and shut the stable-block door behind her.
In the darkness, the beasts huddled together for warmth and comfort. Never go back to StregaSchloss? The prospect was the stuff of nightmares. Tears trickled down fur, scales, and hide as the beasts contemplated a future that offered them no prospect of joy whatsoever.
Bogginview
Following the depressing news about their ancestral home, the Strega-Borgias had grown steadily more haunted and snappy; the adults because of the impending specter of homelessness, and the children due to the sheer exhaustion experienced when looking after the needs of four hundred and four clones.
By complete contrast, the clones thrived. Their pink cheeks grew rosier, their bald heads sprouted hair, and their earlier hissing turned to cheerful clucking sounds.
“Why do they do that?” Pandora muttered, scraping clone poo off the bedside table for the twelfth time that morning. “That stupid hiss-hiss, cluck-cluck sound? It drives me insane.”
“I think it’s because some goose blood got into the mix when they were being made.” Titus plucked an errant clone off the curtain rail, from which vantage point it had been dangling, intermittently clucking and sticking its tongue out at him.
“Get down, you little horror.” Pandora dragged a particularly determined clone off the bathroom cabinet and flung it on the bed.
“Gently,” advised Titus. “If you damage it, I’ll have to put it out of its misery, and I don’t know if I’m up for that. . . .”
“This is just a total nightmare. Keeping them hidden from Latch is awful—you don’t think he’s caught on, do you?”
“Not yet, but he’s getting pretty fed up with wearing the same clothes every day, since I ‘lost’ the key to the built-in wardrobe.”
“What about the hissing?”
“I told him it was the central heating on the blink, but the clucking is making him a bit suspicious.”
“We can’t go on, Titus.” Pandora flung herself on her brother’s bed and immediately a dozen clones climbed up the bedspread and swarmed over her legs. She flapped them away halfheartedly. “Get lost, would you? Titus, when are they going to be house-trained? This is too much. Stop it!”
“It’s just trying to be affectionate,” Titus explained. “Aaah, look, it’s cuddling your leg. Um . . . no, no, it’s not, Pandora, I was wrong—it’s peed down your trousers.”
“Bummer,” groaned Pandora non-anatomically. “Pass me the toilet paper.” She picked the offending clone up in one hand and waggled her index finger in its face. The clone was a Pandora type and, at approximately thirty-nine years old, it stood about four inches high. “Don’t. Do. That. Again,” Pandora enunciated. “Use. The. Toilet. Oh, eurchh, why are they so stupid? Not the floor, the toilet, you dumb creature.”
“We need to find them some clothes,” said Titus, gazing in horror at a Titus type that had managed to wedge a tender portion of its anatomy into an electric outlet. There was a loud bang, a thwarted hiss, and the clone’s corpse fell smoking onto the carpet.
“Oh, dear,” said Pandora insincerely, “what a shame, only four hundred and three left. . . .”
Downstairs, in his bedroom on the fourth floor, Signor Strega-Borgia picked up the telephone and stared at it as if he feared it might sprout fangs, leap onto his neck, and bleed him dry. In the adjacent bathroom, his wife and youngest daughter were sharing a morning bath, a ritual that never failed to cheer them both up whilst simultaneously flooding the bathroom floor. The sound of running water masked the sound of Luciano Strega-Borgia taking the first steps toward selling StregaSchloss.
The day before, both he and his wife had taken a taxi back to their beloved house to view the damage for themselves. Not daring to venture inside, they had huddled in the rose garden, sheltering from the wind under a sweet chestnut tree. Tears had rolled down Signor Strega-Borgia’s nose as he patted the tree trunk. “My great-grandmother planted this,” he said mournfully, “and my great-grandfather planted her underneath it. . . .”
Signora Strega-Borgia looked up at the windows on the first floor. “Titus was born in the blue room,” she whispered. “Do you remember? You were in such a panic. . . .”
“Second window on the right,” sniffed Signor Strega-Borgia. “How could I forget? I jumped out of it and ran to find the midwife. Didn’t think to use the telephone.”
“Oh, Luciano,” sobbed Signora Strega-Borgia, “I feel so . . . adrift without StregaSchloss. I just can’t imagine how we’ll ever get over losing it. I can’t bear it.”
“We still have our family,” said Signor Strega-Borgia, hunting in his pockets for a handkerchief. “We’ll always have our memories of life here.”
“Damp won’t remembe
r it at all.” Signora Strega-Borgia produced an unused diaper from her handbag and offered it to her husband.
The wind howled around them, shaking the naked branches of the chestnut tree and flattening the grass in the meadow. Signor Strega-Borgia shivered. “Let’s go, Baci. We have to leave—the taxi has its meter running and the children will wonder where we are.”
Hand in hand, each bidding an unspoken farewell to StregaSchloss, they crossed the rose garden and walked slowly back to where the waiting taxi was parked on the front drive. Little flakes of snow began to fall from the darkening sky, blown into their faces by the unforgiving wind. . . .
Recalled to the present by the dial tone changing to an automated voice reminding him to replace the handset, Signor Strega-Borgia keyed in several numbers and waited. On the other end, the phone was picked up.
“May I speak to Mr. Bella-Vista?” Signor Strega-Borgia said in a voice hardly louder than a whisper.
“One moment, please, I’ll go and see if he’s available to take your call. And you are . . . ?” Vadette was in full-on receptionist mode, back refreshed from the Christmas holiday.
“Luciano Strega-Borgia.”
“Oh, hello there. I thought I recognized that voice. I’m quite sure Vincent would be delighted to have a word. . . .”
Depressed beyond belief, Signor Strega-Borgia listened to the retreating tippy-tap of Vadette’s stilettos as she rushed away to give Vincent the good news. In the bathroom, a series of squeaks and squeals signaled that Damp was practicing the baby-whale impersonations that she’d perfected in the vast family bathroom at StregaSchloss. Since she was currently attempting them in a niggardly hotel bath little larger than a sink, the resulting deluge hit the floor with a loud slap. There came a pause, presumably while Damp peered over the rim of the bath to view the damage, then another splash and a squeak as she returned to her game.
“Mr. Strega-Borgia? Vincent Bella-Vista here. What can I do you for?”
The telephone felt hot in Signor Strega-Borgia’s hand. In fact, the entire hotel room closed in on him suffocatingly as he sat with the receiver clutched in his hand. Feeling distinctly nauseous, he loosened his tie (a Christmas present from Mrs. McLachlan) and began to speak. On the other end of the phone, Vincent tucked the receiver under his chin and gave his girlfriend the double thumbs-up.
Shortly after lunch, the clan Strega-Borgia (minus the disgraced beasts) climbed into a taxi headed for the Bogginview estate. Mrs. McLachlan and Latch waved them off from the front steps of the hotel. The nanny folded her arms and sighed. “Oh, dear. This is not a happy time for us all.”
“I loved that house,” said Latch. “I can’t quite imagine being a Bogginbutler, somehow.”
“We must remember that it’s the family who employs us and to whom we owe our loyalties, not StregaSchloss.” Mrs. McLachlan watched as the taxi disappeared where the drive wound round a curve of depressed yews. Taking Latch’s arm, she turned to go back into the hotel. From her position behind the curtains in the lounge bar, Mrs. Fforbes-Campbell regarded them both with unalloyed loathing.
“Just pull over here,” Signor Strega-Borgia said to the taxi driver. “We’ll walk for a little bit.”
Outside the warmth of the taxi, the air was bitterly cold. Mutinously, Titus and Pandora followed in their parents’ wake. They’d had to jam all the clones into the wardrobes in both their bedrooms and pray that neither Latch nor Mrs. McLachlan felt a pressing need for an afternoon nap whilst they were away from the hotel. The whole operation had ensured that both children had been well and truly watered in clone pee, and in the arctic wind that whistled round Bogginview, their damp clothes clung icily to their legs.
“What a dump,” moaned Titus as he stomped alongside his sister.
“The view is truly boggin,” agreed Pandora. “I mean, look at it. I didn’t know there was a swamp in Auchenlochtermuchty. . . .”
On either side of the road, dispirited little pines were blown almost parallel to the rutted soil in which they’d been planted. A sign in front of them read:
WELCOME TO BOGGINVIEW
HOMES OF THE FUTURE
ANOTHER QUALITY PROJECT FROM BELLA-VISTA
“What were the other ones?” Titus wondered out loud. “Alcatraz? The Lyubianka? Carstairs?”
“Probably,” agreed Pandora. “D’you think we’ll take to wearing balls and chains and nifty little suits with stripes all over them?”
The first of the “homes of the future” loomed in front of them, unfortunately sited in a rutted depression. The surrounding land was flooded with brown snowmelt in which floated several beer cans.
“Mmm, lovely,” muttered Titus. “Love the garden.”
“Water feature,” corrected Pandora.
As they approached, the front door blew open to reveal Vincent Bella-Vista waving a welcome. “Mind how you go,” he yelled over the howl of the wind. “It’s a bit muddy. Wouldn’t want you to spoil the carpets.”
Huddled in their coats, the Strega-Borgias picked their way across the floodplain, wiped their feet on the doormat, and crowded into the hall of what appeared to be the Bogginview showhouse.
The builder ushered them into a tiny room that had been wallpapered within an inch of its life. The Strega-Borgias sat, squeezed into the overstuffed furniture, smiling politely and trying hard not to stare at the carpet (white), the chandelier (hung so low that its bottom dangly bits scraped the coffee table), the colossal television (on, with sound turned off), and the vast picture (white horses dancing on a moonlit beach) that dominated the mantelpiece.
“Home, sweet home,” said the builder, unwittingly expressing the exact opposite of what the Strega-Borgias were unanimously thinking. Damp slid off her father’s knee and patted the carpet tentatively.
“Right, folks.” In the absence of any encouraging cues from the family, Vincent Bella-Vista shifted gear. “Let’s have a look round. See what you think. Let the kiddies get their bearings.”
The kiddies stared back at him with flat alien eyes. Such was the combined effect of their glare that the builder flailed, faltered, and entered the verbal equivalent of a wheel spin: “Er. Yes. So. Um. If you’ll just follow me. . . . Here we have the fully fitted kitchen-cum-dining room. . . .”
Waiting till Mr. Bella-Vista and the Strega-Borgias had squeezed out of the living room, Pandora unscrewed the lid on her tub of vanishing cream and made some adjustments to the picture hanging over the mantelpiece. Perfect, she thought, turning to rejoin her family; here we have the little-known masterpiece—White Headless Horses Dancing on a Moonlit Beach. Trying to appear interested in Mr. Bella-Vista’s monologue, she crept into the kitchen as the builder continued.
“. . . and on this wall, we have the built-in-microwave-deep-fat-frier-indoor-barbecue-dishwasher-garbage-disp—”
It was just at this moment, as the hapless Vincent Bella-Vista was extolling the virtues of his all-electric house, that Auchenlochtermuchty suffered a total power cut.
The Beastly Blues
Unaware that the world around them had been plunged into midwinter twilight, the beasts had been digging an escape tunnel by Braille. Earlier that afternoon, they’d come to a unanimous decision to run away, since their future in a Bogginview bungalow seemed fraught with difficulties. Incorrectly assuming that they were unloved since the BMW-torching episode, they put an escape plan into operation. They toyed with the idea of burning down the locked stable door with dragon flame, or simply smashing it to smithereens by beast power, but after much debate, they decided that digging their way out would give them several hours of freedom before anyone noticed that they’d gone. Several hours later, a vast mound of recently dug earth towered over the tunnel, round which Sab, Ffup, and Knot stood whispering words of encouragement down to Tock.
“Can’t see a thing,” muttered the crocodile, his front paws sending up a continual shower of earth and pebbles.
“D’you need a break?” said Ffup, looking up from manicuring hi
s talons. “Shall I warm your poor wee paws up a bit?”
“No, thank you,” said Tock. “Crispy claws are not my idea of a helpful suggestion.”
“What happens when we’re out?” demanded Sab. “Has anyone thought that far ahead? Then what? Where do we go from here?”
“Back home,” sniffed the dragon. “Back to our lovely dungeon. I’ll get a fire going, you catch us some grub. . . .”
“I don’t eat meat,” Tock reminded them, in between pawfuls of grassy earth.
“We’ll find you some winter greens in the kitchen garden, then,” said Ffup, “and then . . . well, we’ll just have to be self-sufficient, won’t we?”
“DONE IT!” yelled Tock. “We’re FREE!”
Freezing air poured in through the escape tunnel as the beasts hurriedly packed their meager possessions and headed for the wide-open spaces of the Auchenlochtermuchty Arms parking lot. The recent power cut had worked to their advantage, as all the street lamps were temporarily extinguished. Tock led his co-conspirators toward the river, which flowed in the direction of Lochnagargoyle, the sea loch overlooked by StregaSchloss. The beasts followed a circuitous route through Auchenlochtermuchty, emerging at last into the fields that marked the outskirts of the village. Spattered with mud and chilled to the marrow, they began to wonder if they’d Done The Right Thing.
They stood in a huddle at the edge of a turnip field and tried to get their bearings.
“What’s that shhhlepp shhhlepp noise?” whispered Sab, clutching the dragon’s arm. “It’s coming closer now. Can you hear it?”
“I think it’s me,” admitted Knot, stopping in his tracks and sitting down abruptly. “It’s my fur, dragging through the mud.”
“Where are we?” wailed Ffup. “I don’t recognize any of this. . . .” Over their heads, a pitiless December sky stretched blackly in all directions.
“I smell something,” said Sab.
“I think it’s me,” confessed Knot. “It usually is. . . .”