by Debi Gliori
“No, it’s not you, this time.” The griffin sniffed loudly, his curved nostrils expanding alarmingly. “It’s more like raw lamb. . . .”
Borne on the wind toward where they stood shivering was an unmistakable baa-baa.
“Did you hear that?” Sab nudged Ffup. “Meals-on-hooves sort of sound?”
“I always did prefer my lamb underdone,” mused Ffup. “Two minutes each side. . . .”
“No meat for me,” Tock reminded them.
“Oh, quit being so picky, would you? If we were stranded on a desert island, you’d soon learn to eat meat again.”
“I’d rather starve.”
“The way I see it, my stubborn friend,” said Ffup, wrapping a wing around the sulking crocodile and drawing him to one side, “is that you have some tough choices up ahead. You can join me and the boys as we pick ourselves some free-range lamb, or, as you said, you can starve . . . or”—the dragon indicated the vast expanse of field ahead of them—“you could dine in style on raw muddy turnips. What’s it to be?”
Tock weighed the options open to him and sighed. “I suppose if you cook meat for me, it would be rude to refuse.”
“Come on then. Let’s go get them!” And with a ponderous flap of his leathery wings, Ffup took to the skies, followed by Sab.
The moon came out from behind a bank of snow clouds and cast their twin wheeling shadows into sharp relief against the frozen ruts of the field below. Following behind, awkwardly earthbound, came Knot and Tock, stumbling over turnips and breaking through the icy crust on the occasional puddle. The baa-baa sound came closer and louder now. Dinner was growing nervous.
Clones on the Rampage
Shrouded in gloom, the Strega-Borgias returned to the hotel in Vincent Bella-Vista’s white van. The journey proved to be a singularly unpleasant one due to the odor emanating from dozens of discarded Styrofoam containers, whose decomposing contents bore witness to the builder’s fondness for beefburgers and his inability to finish anything he started. Attempting to make conversation with Vincent Bella-Vista, Signor Strega-Borgia found a tiny bit of common ground between Bogginview and StregaSchloss.
“Your chandelier . . . ,” he began, “reminded me of the one at StregaSchloss. . . . Of course, ours is an ancient old thing, been hanging there for about four hundred years. . . .”
Vincent Bella-Vista yawned widely, and grunted to indicate that he was listening.
Signor Strega-Borgia continued, “D’you know, I’ve often wondered if the legend of the Borgia Diamond is true. . . .”
Sitting next to his father, Titus groaned. Not that old thing again. Boring, boring, boring. He rolled his eyes at Pandora as their father droned on.
“. . . apparently, or so I was told by my grandfather, one of the crystal teardrops on our chandelier is rumored to be a diamond, hidden up there by a long-dead relative, Malvolio di S’Enchantedino Borgia, during the Mhoire Ochone Uprising of . . . um . . . er . . .”
“Sixteen forty-eight,” muttered Signora Strega-Borgia, adding, “Or so they say. Honestly, darling, if it were true, we would hardly be about to sell StregaSchloss to Mr. Belle Atavista here, would we? We’d be selling the diamond and using the proceeds to mend our poor . . . our lovely . . . oh, Lucianoooo.” She stopped, tears spilling down her face.
At this unhappy moment, the van’s headlights picked out the profile of the Auchenlochtermuchty Arms, wreathed in fog and, regrettably, still without electricity. On the desk in the reception area, an oil lamp threw just enough light to enable the family to pick their way to the residents’ lounge. To Titus and Pandora’s relief, sitting on either side of a blazing fire were Latch and Mrs. McLachlan, deep in the final stages of a game of Monopoly, which, judging by the number of houses and hotels littering the board, had been going on all afternoon. This fireside cameo was so reminiscent of rainy winter days spent in the library at StregaSchloss that the family felt their bleak mood recede slightly.
Signor Strega-Borgia moved a chair closer to the fire. Maybe it might be possible to re-create some of the ambience, if not the identical surroundings of StregaSchloss, he thought, staring into the flames.
If we got rid of that ghastly carpet and brought some of our own books and paintings, perhaps even Bogginview could become a home for us all, thought Signora Strega-Borgia, curling onto a sofa.
No such domestic concerns entered the heads of Titus and Pandora. Their shared preoccupation was with the clones and what had happened in their caretakers’ absence. Excusing themselves, they made for the stairs.
Four flights up, they found an abandoned flashlight lying in an alcove. As Titus turned it on, its beam swept across the cobwebby ceiling, causing Pandora to be struck by an unhappy thought.
“Tarantella . . . ,” she moaned, grabbing Titus’s arm. “If there’s no roof left at StregaSchloss, then there’s no attic, either. Oh, poor her. . . .” She slumped against the wall and groaned.
“Come on,” Titus sighed. “Never mind that horrible tarantula, we have to deal with the clones.”
“Your clones,” said Pandora, following reluctantly upstairs. “My spider. I didn’t get us into this mess, Titus.”
“Help me out here, would you?” said Titus. “We’ll try and hide the clones somewhere no one can hear them and then, I promise, I’ll come back to StregaSchloss with you and we’ll find your spider.”
“And Multitudina and Terminus?”
“You drive a hard bargain, but yes, them, too.”
They stopped outside Titus’s room. Filtered through the door came music and voices. Little voices. Lots of them. Titus unlocked the door and edged in, followed by Pandora.
A scene of chaos and mayhem greeted them. The clones, mercifully no larger than earlier that day, but regrettably far more vocal, were backlit by Titus’s laptop. Absorbed in their own world, they failed to notice the arrival of their giant caretakers.
“They must have broken out of the wardrobe . . . and where did they get that music?” Pandora whispered.
“It’s a CD. They’re playing it on my laptop, the little toads.”
The little toads gyrated, bumped, and ground to the rhythm. The fact that they were still utterly naked merely added to the overall hideousness. Out from behind the splintered door of the wardrobe came a pungent odor that suggested that though the clones may have mastered the workings of Titus’s laptop, the complexities of a toilet still eluded them.
“HEY!” squeaked one of the Titus types. “It’s the big dude and dudette! Come in—join the party! What took you so long?”
On the screen of the laptop, a dialogue box informed them that the laptop’s battery was heading for pancake status and pretty soon the lights would dim, the music stop, and it would be time to go home. Pandora lit a candle, and in the flare of the match accidentally scorched a clone. Heartlessly running it under the bathroom tap and telling it to quit moaning, she headed back into the bedroom and clapped her hands for attention.
“RIGHT, YOU LOT,” she said in a voice learned firsthand from Mrs. McLachlan, “enough of this nonsense. Turn that racket off, go and wash your faces, and then it’s time for bed.”
A communal “Awwww” went up from the clones. Mutters of “That’s not fair” and “Boring” were ignored as the tribe of clones trooped obediently into the bathroom.
Titus was seriously impressed. His immediate response to the sight of the clone revel was to lie down on the carpet and sob, but his sister had managed to get the situation under control in one minute flat.
“Right, Titus,” she said, still in McLachlan mode, “you supervise face washing and I’ll go and find somewhere for them to sleep.” Placing the candle on her brother’s bedside table, she tiptoed out into the corridor. A dim light filtered up from downstairs as she groped her way along the landing. Encountering one of the many vast radiators that normally hissed and bubbled all night long, she noticed that it was stone cold. Opposite the radiator, the door to the linen cupboard stood open. Reaching inside, Pando
ra helped herself to a large pile of woollen blankets and continued on her passage down the darkened landing. Just as she was about to give up and try another floor, she saw the perfect solution to the clone-containment problem. A hatch halfway up the wall proclaimed itself to be a service lift. On the brass plate engraved with this information were two unlit buttons and a small notice that read:
STAFF ONLY
IN THE EVENT OF A POWER FAILURE, PLEASE USE THE MANUAL PULLEY
The service lift must have stopped somewhere between floors when the power cut occurred. Sure that even the most determined clones couldn’t break out of what was, in effect, a ventilated metal safe, Pandora opened the hatch and peered inside. In the darkness, she made out a brass wheel roughly the size of a dinner plate. She groped in the dark and began to turn the wheel clockwise. From far below her feet, a distant rumble told her that the lift was on its way.
Meanwhile, Titus had raided both Latch’s and his own supply of socks in order to provide some of the clones with a rudimentary form of clothing to protect them from the ravages of a Scottish winter in a currently unheated hotel. Using the butler’s toenail clippers, Titus gouged a neck hole in the toe of each sock, shredded two armholes in either side, and dragged the woolly tubes over the protesting heads of as many clones as he could find socks for. Turning his attention to the remainder of the naked clones, who huddled shivering on his bed, he began to cut a hotel towel into tiny squares and, with a hole chewed in the center of each square, managed to clothe the sockless clones in tiny toweling ponchos. Ignoring their protests of “I’m not wearing that” and “I want an Adidas sock, not a boring old woolly one,” Titus stuffed the last Titus type back into the sock from which it had been trying to escape and sat down abruptly on the floor.
He was exhausted. Around him, sock- and poncho-clad clones yawned and whined incessantly, their twitching bodies casting giant candlelit shadows on the wall behind them.
Titus was nearly asleep when Pandora poked her head round the door and beckoned him over. “We’ll have to do this in batches,” she said. “How many d’you think we can carry at a time?”
“No more than ten.”
“That won’t work. It would take us all night. . . .” Pandora looked at the herds of clones lolling on Titus’s bed, comparing socks and ponchos.
“The bedspread,” Titus said. “We can bundle them all up in it and carry them in one go.”
The clones were less than keen on this plan for their travel arrangements. Bundled ignominiously into a candlewick bedspread and then dragged bumpily along the corridor, they protested loudly. At the end of the corridor, the service lift yawned open. Pandora had carefully lined its floor with blankets to deaden the noise and to provide some insulation against the chill of the metal lift. Such thoughtfulness failed to impress the clones. Their protests became more shrill as Titus and Pandora heaved the candlewick bundle into the empty lift.
“Oh, do shut up,” said Pandora, slamming the door on their howls of outrage and beginning to turn the wheel. The noise diminished with each turn until, finally giving it four complete turns for good measure, Pandora closed the hatch and slumped against the wall. Downstairs, the clock in reception chimed eight o’clock. Dinnertime. “I’ll meet you by the front door at midnight,” she said. “And pray that the power stays off till then.”
“There are some advantages to having no electricity.” Titus grinned. “I can guarantee that there will be no Brussels sprouts with dinner. . . .”
Brief Encounter
Sheltered under a clump of Scots pines, the beasts gazed up at the moonlit sky in a state of utter contentment. Earlier, Ffup had lit a small fire and they had roasted their dinner over the flames. Sab idly scanned the loch shore for perfectly flat skimming stones. Tock grinned widely, unaware that his many teeth were speckled with the burnt remains of barbecued mutton. He patted his stomach, tossed a large bone into the fire, and flopped back against a tree trunk.
Ffup regarded him balefully. “I must say, for a reluctant convert to carnivorism, you choked down far more than your fair share. . . .”
The crocodile nodded in agreement. He had devoured the best part of one entire sheep, leaving only the back legs for his companions. Disgusted, Ffup stood up and turned round to warm his wings at the fire. Overhead, clouds scudded across the winter sky. The beasts shivered and drew closer to the flames. Far away, something howled.
“What was that?” Sab’s voice shook.
Knot looked up from a half-gnawed leg bone. Grease had dribbled down his front, adding to his perpetually unsavory appearance, and clots of semi-masticated mutton dotted his tangled fur. “Maybe a wolf?” he mumbled hopefully. “D’you think they’d taste good?”
“I’ll go and investigate,” said Ffup. “You guys stay here and keep the fire going. I’ll be back in a moment.”
Stepping out from the shelter of the pines, he stretched his wings to their full span and, with a couple of languid flaps, disappeared over the treetops.
Sab looked around. Tock was sprawled beside the fire emitting a loud reptilian snore, punctuated with occasional belches as he digested his dinner. The griffin threw another log on the fire and stared into the flames.
“Reminds me of being a toddler,” he said, his eyes misting over with the effort of recalling events from four centuries past. “We were sharing a roost with Ffup’s family in the Great Forest of Caledon. . . . Ffup’s dad had been forcibly relocated there after a bit of an upset over exceeding his quota of edible maidens. . . . Ffup’s mum had a broken wing. . . .” He paused to check that he had the yeti’s undivided attention and continued. “Anyway, Malvolio di S’Enchantedino Borgia, who’d evicted some dodgy tenant from StregaSchloss, had installed his ancient grandmother in his wine cellar—and she was totally batty, gray hair down to her knees—called Strega-Nonna. . . . Stop me if you’ve heard this before, won’t you?”
The yeti smiled politely and crammed another lump of sheepskin into his glistening maw. Knot had heard this story a thousand times or more, but in the absence of their beloved StregaSchloss, it was somehow comforting to recall the house, even if only in the form of legend. Knot settled down in the pine needles, his body language indicating his willingness to have the griffin continue. Sparks flew into the darkness, and above the hiss from the fire came the howl again, fainter now.
Much later, as Sab had reached the interesting bit about how Strega-Nonna had mended his mother’s wing with a combination of magic and cobwebs, a leathery flapping sound alerted the beasts to the return of Ffup. The dragon swooped down onto the carpet of pine needles and stood, towering above them, wings slowly folding back against his spine, his scales in some disarray. “Heavens! Is that the time? I’d no idea I’d been away for so long.”
The beasts regarded their colleague in some confusion. Ffup babbled on, blissfully unaware. “Amazing how time flies when you’re having fun. Who’d have thought it? After all these years of snorting and spitting and trying to be pure dead macho. . . . And then, tonight, on this gloriously romantic winter night, something . . . something showed me my true female nature. Guys, guess what, I’m a girl—” The dragon stopped in mid-babble, arrested by the faint but unmistakable sound of a distant howl.
“Ffup? FFUP!” Sab hugged the dragon and lifted up his . . . no—her chin in order to stare into her eyes. “Ffup? You’re . . . you’re . . .”
“WHAT?” squeaked the dragon, unaccustomed to being the center of attention and trying desperately to bury her head in her wings.
“You’re blushing!”
The Guilt Trip
Titus’s feet were freezing. He’d donated every pair of socks that he possessed in the pursuit of clone clothing, and this left him with no other option but to wear wellies over his bare feet as he and his sister walked to their old home. And, he realized, he was developing blisters on both heels.
“Stop sulking, Titus,” said Pandora. “I did my bit to help with the clones; now it’s your turn to reciprocat
e with finding Tarantella.”
Behind them, the lights of Auchenlochtermuchty suddenly came back on. They twinkled reassuringly in the dark, offering Titus and Pandora no comfort whatsoever.
“The lift,” moaned Pandora, struck by the implications of a full return to normal electric supplies. “It’ll start working.”
“Just hurry up,” muttered Titus. “The sooner we get this over and done with, the sooner we can deal with the clones.”
Stumbling and moaning, they half-ran, half-walked till they reached the main gate to StregaSchloss. The sign that warned trespassers that they would be eaten for breakfast/turned into frogs/forced to eat Brussels sprouts was completely obscured by a police notice that read:
WARNING—HAZARDOUS BUILDING
no entry except by authorized personnel
Disregarding this, the children scrambled over the gate and stopped for a moment, drinking in the sight of their old home. Silhouetted in the moonlight, StregaSchloss stood before them, its exposed roof timbers skeletal and derelict against the night sky.
“Oh, poor house,” whispered Pandora, horrified at the extent of the damage.
Titus groaned in agreement. “They’ll never fix it now. It’s a wreck.”
As they ran toward home, they couldn’t fail to notice further signs of dilapidation. Tock’s moat had overflowed its boundaries, spilling mud across the rose-quartz courtyard. An overturned wheelie bin had vomited its contents across the kitchen garden and shredded plastic bags had wrapped themselves round an ancient wisteria, flapping and rattling in the wind that scoured the south-facing wall.
Something was wrong with the drains as well. . . . When Titus and Pandora lifted the stone griffin that both guarded the front door and provided a handy stash for the key, their bent heads were brought into close proximity to a covered drain.
“Phwoarrr!” Titus reeled back in disgust. “And I thought rancid goose was the pits. . . .” He pulled the collar of his fleece up over his nose and mouth and unlocked the front door. They pushed past a soggy pile of leaves that had gathered in the doorway in their absence and, at last, returned to their true home.