by Debi Gliori
Wedged overhead, her feet against one wall, her back against another, with Damp cradled asleep across her lap, Mrs. McLachlan tutted. “What have you been eating? Och, you poor wee pet. . . .”
Startled to hear herself addressed by such a sympathetic toilet, Ffup banged her head on the cistern as she peered upward. Mrs. McLachlan beamed down at her from the ceiling and pressed a warning finger to her lips.
On the other side of the ruined door, a voice complained, “Run this past me again. You hurl your engagement ring at me, call me a cheapskate, and run off into the night armed with a rolling pin. I follow you. . . . Halfway here an insane cat falls through my windscreen, claws me to ribbons. . . . I finally make it here to find your motor’s got four flat tires, you’re out cold on the floor, I have to climb over a body to get in the front door, and all you can go on about is a spider with lipstick. Just tell me, in words of one syllable, what the devil is going on.”
Another voice, female this time, replied testily, “Aw, shut up, Vinnie. Let’s just go back home. Forget I ever mentioned diamonds. This place gives me the creeps.”
“Not till I’ve found Huey,” came the rejoinder. “I know he’s here somewhere. I can smell that poncy aftershave he’s always wearing. My guess is he’s out on the roof checking out the damage. If you can’t tell me what’s going on, then maybe he can. I want an explanation. . . .”
The sound of footsteps going upstairs faded away into silence. Mrs. McLachlan slid down the walls till she came to rest beside Ffup. With a stern warning to guard Damp with her life, she passed the sleeping baby across to the dragon and headed off to try and find Titus and Pandora. The dragon looked down on her slumbering charge. Strange maternal feelings stirred beneath the scales of her breast. Patting Damp gently and tucking the baby deeper under her wing, Ffup settled down on the bathroom floor to wait for Mrs. McLachlan’s return.
Halfway down the dungeon stairs, Knot lay curled in a massive hairy ball, his hands folded across his distended stomach. He’d devoured Mrs. Fforbes-Campbell in three vast gulps, without pausing to chew between mouthfuls. With his appetite temporarily satisfied, the yeti had fallen into a fitful belching slumber. A few uneaten clumps of Ffion’s mink coat dotted the stairs around him, and a crocodile-skin handbag was propped up behind the yeti’s head.
Mrs. McLachlan edged past his inert form and descended into darkness. Grunts and squeaks alerted her to the children’s whereabouts. Stumbling in the gloom, she caught sight of them eerily lit by Ffion Fforbes-Campbell’s abandoned flashlight. Mrs. McLachlan blinked a couple of times and then strode forward, totally unfazed by their headless state.
“Very funny,” she muttered, untying the knots that bound them. “Just tell me what you think you’re both doing here in the middle of the night. If your parents knew about this little escapade, they’d have a fit. . . .”
Titus reached up to where his head should have been and produced a soggy rolled-up handkerchief out of thin air. The effect of this was most peculiar. Untainted by vanishing cream, his mouth suddenly appeared, its seeming lack of connection to anything resembling a face producing the weird image of lips waving in space. Beside him, Pandora’s mouth appeared likewise.
“It was her,” moaned Titus. “Her and her precious spider and rats.”
“Oh, right. We’re not mentioning your clones, are we?” snapped Pandora.
“Clones?” said Mrs. McLachlan. “Just what exactly have you two been up to?”
Both disembodied mouths snapped shut.
Mrs. McLachlan frowned. “Frankly, I’d far rather be tucked up in my nice warm bed than down here freezing to death in the company of several murderous villains, four escapee beasts, and a pair of ungrateful children who haven’t the sense to do as they’re told—”
From overhead came the sound of a colossal crash. Mrs. McLachlan’s eyes widened in alarm. Remembering the nanny’s dire warnings about the perilous state of StregaSchloss, Pandora began to cry. “It’s going to collapse . . . ,” she wailed. “We’ll be buried alive!”
“QUICK!” yelled Titus, grabbing the flashlight. “There’s a way out by the moat. Down the sewage tunnel along here—hurry up, we can’t hang around here waiting for the walls to come down.”
As if to emphasize the urgency of his words, another crash echoed and reverberated round the dungeon. Trusting that Ffup had enough sense to take Damp and Latch outside to safety, Mrs. McLachlan followed the children down the labyrinthine passages that linked the dungeons to the moat.
Beastly Confessions
Perched on one of the exposed roof timbers like a living gargoyle, Sab was giving himself a severe talking to. That had just been too clumsy for words. Most un-griffin-like behavior. Should be deeply ashamed of yourself. He looked at his curved talons, turning them this way and that and tutting as he did so. What a complete numpty, he chided himself, even though he’d just been trying to help. A few minutes ago, the griffin had come across Vincent Bella-Vista and Vadette, picking their way across a particularly dodgy section of roof, and offered them a helping talon. . . .
Digging those same talons into the roof timber to keep himself from accidentally slipping off into space, Sab looked down through the open heart of StregaSchloss. A vast hole appeared to have been blasted through it from roof to cellar. Splintered wood and shattered plaster still rained down through the hole, pattering and crashing through floors and ceilings, and coming to rest in a pile on the distant floor of the great hall—a pile of timber and rubble under which lay two still figures, their blood leaching out across the floor beneath.
“I can’t apologize enough,” whispered the griffin. “So sorry. But you shouldn’t have put up such a struggle. I was only trying to help. . . . This roof is so dangerous, and there you were, clambering around on it. And then—well, I’m just gutted, frankly. That’ll teach me to leave well enough alone. . . .”
With a flap of his leathery wings, Sab glided off his perch and arrowed down, down through the house, through a rising cloud of plaster dust, down to the great hall, where he landed, skidded inelegantly on his slippy talons, and, recovering his balance, came to a standstill beside Latch.
“Um . . . ,” said the griffin, prodding the butler’s inert form, “could you wake up and talk to me? Please? I think I’ve done something awful. . . .”
“Me, too,” said Ffup, emerging from the bathroom with Damp still asleep in the cradle of her wings.
“Well, I don’t feel in the least bit guilty,” said Knot, appearing at the end of the corridor. “She was deeelicious.”
Latch’s eyes fluttered open as he tried to focus on the beasts bending over him, their eyes moist with concern.
“We’ve got something to tell you . . . ,” began Ffup.
“You’re going to be awfully vexed,” Sab said, his voice tinged with regret.
“Are you sure you know where we’re going?” Mrs. McLachlan’s voice betrayed no sense of the terror she was desperately trying to conceal from the children as she followed them blindly along the tunnels beneath StregaSchloss.
“Er . . . yes,” Titus lied, pausing to lean against the wall and wait for the other two to catch up. His back ached horribly from the crouching gait they’d had to adopt as the roof of the tunnel gradually began to slope down toward the floor. Mrs. McLachlan was completely hunched over, walking like a bear, her hands groping along the floor, feeling for her way in the dim light from Titus’s flashlight.
The air in the tunnels was stale and chill, smelling of damp and decay. At one point they’d crossed a fetid puddle: Mrs. McLachlan recognized the reek—it was the recently flushed contents of the downstairs toilet intermingled with other horrors too gruesome to relate. She had wisely kept this information to herself as the children gagged and choked up ahead. Stranded in the shallows were several soggy envelopes and a long, drenched snake of toilet paper. Remembering the long-ago morning when Damp had flushed the post down the toilet, Mrs. McLachlan shuddered in disgust and transferred the sog
gy envelopes to her breast pocket, a kind of talisman against their return from the tunnels—and also in case they contained anything of importance to the family.
Pandora staggered over to where Titus crouched, waiting for her, and slumped onto the wet floor with a small wail. “We’re going to die, Titus,” she said bleakly. “We’ll never find our way out. In hundreds of years they’ll find our shriveled remains, and we’ll end up in a museum labeled THE BOG DWELLERS OF ARGYLL.” She closed her eyes and groaned. “I’m so tired. I feel like we’ve been walking down here for miles and miles. I just wish—” She stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, opened her eyes, and grabbed Titus’s arm. “What’s that?”
The rhythmic splash splash of Mrs. McLachlan’s crawling echoed behind them, the sound overlaid now by a quieter pattering noise.
“It sounds like rain,” murmured Titus, peering up ahead into the darkness.
“Can’t be,” said Mrs. McLachlan, coming to a halt beside Pandora. “Not down here.”
Titus’s flashlight picked out something moving in the distance. “Oh, no . . . ,” he groaned. “That’s all we need. Disgusting. It’s a rat.”
Mrs. McLachlan forced herself not to scream. She’d almost grown used to Pandora’s pet rats, but wild subterranean ones were a different matter entirely. . . .
“Oh, yes!” yelled Pandora, clambering over Titus in her haste. “Don’t you see? It’s not a rat, it’s my rat! Oh, Titus, we’re going to be all right—it’s Multitudina!”
Up ahead, Multitudina skidded to a standstill. Doesn’t smell like her, she decided, blinking as the dancing girl bore down on her. Sounds familiar, though. What on earth is my trained biped doing down here? Further speculation was curtailed as Pandora scooped Multitudina up in her arms and rained kisses down on her head.
“Euchh. Look at its teeth,” Titus gagged. “Yellow fangy things. Pandora, you’re weird. Don’t kiss—oh, yeurchh, tell me I’m not related to her.”
Titus and Mrs. McLachlan waited, shuddering with a mixture of cold and disgust as, in between kisses, Pandora explained why they were currently touring StregaSchloss’s dungeons.
Finally losing patience with his sister’s kiss fest, Titus interrupted. “Listen, Multitudina, if you can lead us out of here, I’ll personally empty the contents of the freezer onto the floor and you can eat the lot. That’s a promise.”
Needing no further encouragement, the rat wriggled out of Pandora’s arms and swam off down the tunnel. She paused to check that the bipeds were following, squeaked her approval, and set off once more.
Splashing behind in Multitudina’s wake, Titus, Pandora, and Mrs. McLachlan followed their unlikely savior along the tunnel to freedom.
Stone Skimming
Plaster dust filled the air as Latch, Tock, and the beasts sat round the kitchen table drinking tea and devouring an overlooked packet of digestive biscuits. Washing the milk jug out in the sink, Knot had found what he’d taken to be a small and tantalizingly rancid fur ball glued to the bottom of the jug. He’d been about to devour this when the fur ball informed him that its name was Terminus and proceeded to put up such a fight that the yeti had been forced to hurl it, squeaking, into the kitchen garden. Deeply puzzled, Knot helped himself to another biscuit and scratched his bottom thoughtfully.
Oblivious to all the drama, Damp slept on Ffup’s lap, her chest rising and falling in time with her little snores. The butler had stoked the kitchen range, and now it clanked and bubbled in the background, throwing out heat all around the room.
“So”—Latch was attempting to grasp the details of what had passed while he’d been unconscious on the hall floor—“what is needed here is for us to come up with some convincing way of making it look like all four of those deceased criminals met with an accident when they broke into StregaSchloss.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” said Sab, pouring himself another cup of tea.
“But we’ve got three vehicles and only two corpses,” Latch reminded the beasts. “Knot’s eaten the third and Ffup’s toasted her partner. How are we going to explain the extra car?”
“If we could dispose of the Land Rover, who’s to say they were even here? Apart from ourselves, no one knows that they came to StregaSchloss tonight.” Ffup rubbed her tummy and groaned deeply. “We’d have to get rid of the crocodile-skin handbag, but Tock could give it another state funeral. . . .”
“But the car,” insisted Latch, “we can’t bury a car.”
“We could push it in the loch, with the barbecued roofer in it,” suggested Sab, “or—even better—Ffup and I could fly with it out to the middle of the loch and drop it in. No one knows how deep it is out there.”
“But the taxi driver,” said Latch, “he took Mrs. McLachlan, Damp, and me out to StregaSchloss. He’s a witness. . . . Oh, this is all so hideously complicated.”
“I’m in no fit state to carry a car plus a roofer out to the middle of the loch,” moaned Ffup. “My tummy hurts.”
Sab lost patience. “The alternative is admitting that you turned an innocent citizen into a charred heap of carbon—I think the police might take a rather dim view of such unprovoked behavior. . . .”
“All right, all right.” Ffup stood up. “Come on. Let’s do it. First the car, then the handbag.”
The beasts and Tock followed, obliterating all incriminating tire tracks as Latch drove the Fforbes-Campbell Land Rover down to the loch shore. On the seat beside him, smoldering gently, Hugh Pylum-Haight’s remains still emitted a faint but recognizable whiff of aftershave. Latch turned the engine off and climbed out onto the pebble beach, gently taking Damp from Ffup’s cradle of wings.
With a deep sigh, Ffup attempted to hoist the vehicle onto her shoulders. “Oofff—it’s heavier than I thought. . . . Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
“You’re such a wimp,” Sab complained, gripping his side of the Land Rover and swinging it upward with a grunt. “Stop moaning and get on with it. If you hadn’t toasted that bloke, we wouldn’t be doing this.”
Groaning and squabbling, the dragon and the griffin effortfully climbed into the sky, their wings laboring as they bore the weight of the vehicle and its cargo between them. Slowly they flapped out across Lochnagargoyle, the Land Rover’s wheels barely cresting the little waves that splashed back to shore, where the others watched anxiously. Damp woke up in Latch’s arms and gazed calmly around. Since flying cars are the everyday currency of infant picture books, the bizarre sight of a Land Rover winging its way across the loch barely caused her to frown. Surrounded by her familiar beasts and lulled by the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, she sighed and went back to sleep.
Out over the uncharted deeps of the loch, the dragon and the griffin nodded to each other. On a count of three they let go. Making hardly a splash, the Land Rover slipped beneath the surface, sinking rapidly to the bottom of Lochnagargoyle and leaving no trace of its passing. Relieved of their burden, Ffup and Sab flew back to the shore and joined their co-conspirators.
“What an effort,” moaned Ffup. “Hang on a minute—I need a poo.”
“What, again?” said Sab. “You’ve really got a problem with your tripes, pal. This is the tenth time tonight.”
Ignoring this, Ffup squatted on the pebbly beach in full view of her horrified companions.
“Oh, please,” groaned Sab, pointedly turning his back and picking up a skimming stone. “At least have the decency to go behind a bush.” He selected a perfect skimming stone, totally flat and utterly square, and drew back his paw in preparation for throwing it.
“Wait a minute . . . stop! Don’t do that!” Latch made a grab for Sab’s paw.
Behind them, Ffup shrieked, “I can’t stop! OW! OW! OWWW! It HURTS!”
“Not you, you daft dragon—him. Sab, let me see that stone.” Latch prised Sab’s talons apart and examined the skimming stone.
“It’s not a stone! It’s a BOULDER!” Ffup screamed. “AAARGH! I’m going to BURST! HELLLLP!”
Tock
ambled over to where Ffup squatted. The dragon’s eyeballs were bulging with effort, tears rolling down her long nose. Little puffs of steam came from her nostrils as she heaved and strained over the pebbles.
“You need a laxative,” the crocodile said helpfully. “Should have eaten more fruit. Prunes and apricots—that sort of thing. . . .”
The dragon panted faster and faster, her little breaths punctuated with the occasional snort of flame.
“Sab—where did you find this stone?” said Latch, hardly daring to believe what he was holding.
“That one?” said the griffin. “Oh, it was one of the ones Tock found for me earlier this evening—when we were playing around after we’d eaten the sheep. There’s millions of them in the water. Ask Tock—he’ll get you more. D’you want a game? I warn you, I’m a world-class stone skimmer. . . .”
“AUGHHH urgh AUGHHH!”
“Relax,” muttered Tock. “Now push. Go for it.”
“RRRGH urgh MMMNG.”
“Well done! Take a break. Relax.”
“It’s a slate!” cried Latch. “It’s a StregaSchloss roof slate!”
“Don’t be silly,” said Ffup, waddling back to the lochside with Tock beaming beside her. “It’s an egg. My very first one. Look, everyone! I’m a mummy!”
In her claws, the dragon held a blue speckled egg, not unlike a vast rugby ball. Ffup glowed, she twinkled, and she looked so proud and radiantly happy that everyone clustered around her, all thoughts of slates and roofs temporarily forgotten as they laughed and hugged each other, passing the egg around carefully as they absorbed the miracle that had occurred in their midst.