by Debi Gliori
Down to Business
Multitudina reached the edge of the moat and dragged herself onto comparatively dry land. Behind her, gasping with the shock of swimming in such icy water, came Mrs. McLachlan, with Pandora towing Titus behind her.
“Time you learned to swim,” Pandora said, crawling out of the water and turning to haul a dripping and choking Titus onto the rose quartz beside her. Above them, the stars shone clearly in the icy chill of the winter’s night. Stumbling and shivering uncontrollably, heedless of StregaSchloss’s structural dangers, they ran in through the front door, praying that Damp, Latch, Tarantella, Tock, and the beasts had not only survived, but had kept the home fires burning.
In the kitchen, the beasts and Latch rose to greet them. Damp slept, tucked into a bed hastily improvised from a cutlery drawer, swaddled in tea towels, and utterly oblivious of the events surrounding her. In the absence of a roof over her attic, Tarantella was spinning herself a temporary web in the china cupboard. The beasts had been sitting round the kitchen table, cooing and exclaiming over Ffup’s egg, but with the arrival of the drenched party from the dungeons, they lurched into action. Latch rushed upstairs to find dry towels and changes of clothing and Sab put the kettle on. Feeling distinctly overlooked, Multitudina sulked under the table as Pandora, Titus, and Mrs. McLachlan admired the egg.
“Oh, it’s absolutely beautiful!” exclaimed Pandora, not daring to touch it in case her shivering hands let it slip. “Aren’t you clever? It’s magnificent, Ffup! When will it hatch? Oh, I can’t wait . . . A baby dragon . . .”
“I assume it is a dragon, dear?” said Mrs. McLachlan, peering suspiciously at the egg cradled in Ffup’s lap.
The proud mother smiled beatifically and pretended she hadn’t heard the last question. Knot ambled over to the range, scratching his tummy and emitting a pungent reek of rancid mutton combined with the perfume of old dog. Catching a whiff of this foul odor, and reminded abruptly of Titus’s rancid goose incubator, Pandora choked and moved out of olfactory range. This made her the first thing the clones caught sight of as, unannounced, they herded into the kitchen in search of comfort.
“MAMAAAA!” they bawled in unison, running toward her, tiny arms outstretched, tripping pathetically over their socks and ponchos in their headlong rush.
“Oh, no!” squeaked Pandora. “No way! Not me, you numpties, I’m never going to be a mothe—”
Swarming over and past Pandora, the clones threw themselves onto the bewildered Knot, clambering up his filthy fur, snuffling ecstatically at his faintly remembered stench, his pungent smell of fetid meat. It was a smell that spoke to the clones of their brief babyhood, of their early days in the goose incubator, and so it was hardly surprising that they assumed Knot to be their mother. Pandora watched in horror as the clones buried themselves in the yeti’s unhygienic nooks and crannies, sobbing and whimpering as they did so.
“WAUGHHH HELLLLP!” wailed the yeti, overwhelmed by the vast numbers of clones currently taking gross liberties with his person. With his entire body covered in wriggling figures, Knot panicked, stumbled, and, with a desolate shriek, fell over onto Ffup’s lap. The egg bounced under the impact, rolled down Ffup’s leg, and trundled rapidly across the floor, headed for the kitchen garden. It wobbled perilously on the edge of the step, seemingly intent on ovisuicide, and then appeared to undergo a change of heart. In full view of everyone it stopped, appeared to levitate itself to a handspan above the doormat, and retraced its path back across the floor.
From the kitchen garden came the clearly audible command, “Left. Right. Left. Right. HAAAAAALT! After three, down to the floor. STEADY! Don’t DROP it, whatever you do. . . . One, two, three, DOWN! Fifth Battalion of the Dragon’s-Tooth Engineers, AT EEEASE!”
The egg was gently lowered to the kitchen floor, and, to the astonishment of the onlookers, out from under it marched a dozen tiny men in kilts.
“Oh, my heavens . . . ,” whispered Titus. “The Dragon’s-Tooth Tincture! Mum’ll murder me if she finds out.”
“What? What are you on about?” Pandora picked up one of the tiny squaddies and examined him. He tried to hide under his shield and, failing in the attempt, braced himself for extinction.
“Mum had a bottle of Dragon’s-Tooth Tincture in the fridge, as part of her homework from the Advanced Witchcraft Institute,” Titus explained, “sort of an instant army kind of thing. Add water and stir, and ten minutes later you’re overrun with squaddies.”
“But they’re teeny,” said Pandora, peering under the kilt of one she held prisoner in her hand. He battered her feebly with his shield in an effort to preserve his dignity.
“Your mother used Ffup’s baby teeth to distill the tincture,” said Mrs. McLachlan. “That might account for their size. . . .”
Pandora returned the indignant squaddie to the company of his battalion. “We’re becoming overrun with wee things without pants,” she said. “First Titus’s clones, now these animated toy soldiers, not to mention Ffup’s egg.”
“Excuse me,” snorted Ffup, plucking her egg off the floor and tucking it protectively under one wing. “It may not be wearing any underwear, but my egg is not vertically challenged.”
“No one said it was, dear,” said Mrs. McLachlan soothingly. “It’s a very fine egg, and I’m sure one day it will grow up to be a great strapping dragon.”
“That would be highly unlikely,” muttered Ffup under her breath, returning to her seat by the range.
“But what are we going to do with them all?” wailed Titus.
Latch came through the kitchen door carrying a pile of towels and clothes. Mrs. McLachlan and Pandora helped themselves to some of these and disappeared into the privacy of the pantry to change. The butler’s jaw dropped as he absorbed the sight of milling squaddies and wriggling clones. “What on earth is going on?” he demanded, dropping the remaining towels at his feet.
The clones instantly abandoned their surrogate Knot parent and leapt at the new sartorial opportunities represented by such a mountain of toweling. Recognizing several of his stolen socks running across the kitchen floor, Latch turned to Titus for an explanation.
“Ah, yes . . . er . . .” Titus grabbed Multitudina from under the table and sidled off in the direction of the pantry. “Back in two ticks. I just have to honor a promise I made to Mul . . . Mult . . . um, yes . . .”
Latch groaned and sat down at the table. Sab appeared at his elbow with a cup of tea and leant over to pat him with a consoling talon. “Drink up,” the griffin murmured. “It’ll all seem so much better in the morning. . . .”
“It is the morning.” Latch gazed at his watch for confirmation. “Soon I’ll have to telephone my employers and explain that we are all here, at StregaSchloss, and not tucked up in our beds in the Auchenlochtermuchty Arms. Also, I will have to present Signor and Signora Strega-Borgia with the happy news that not only is their missing roof lying at the bottom of Lochnagargoyle, but—oh, joy—they have hundreds of extra mouths to feed. Then there is the little matter of a massive hole driven through their house by flying criminals and, lest I forget, the fact that their staff and children have been party to four murders, killing the only chap who could have repaired the damage to the roof in the first place. . . .”
“But at least we’ve found the missing slates,” said Sab, determinedly clinging to the positive aspects of the night’s events.
“Oh, aye, in the loch—they’re about as much use as chocolate teapots, aren’t they?” Latch replaced his teacup in its saucer and sighed.
“But don’t you see?” Sab grabbed the butler’s arm, causing his teacup to slop its contents across the table. “With the slates we can fix the roof!”
Dabbing at the puddle of tea in front of him, Latch took a deep breath. “Much as I hate to be a killjoy—if you recall, Ffup crisped the roofing contractor. The roof is falling to bits. . . . I doubt if you’d find a replacement firm of roofers who’d be willing to risk life and limb up there, crawling over the truss
es, trying to nail tiles onto wood that might not bear their weight. . . .” Depressed beyond belief by his own gloomy predictions, Latch closed his eyes and laid his head on the table with a groan.
However, Sab was not to be deflected from his mission to bring good cheer to the butler. “Look, here’s my plan. Tock gets the slates back out of the loch and we’ll organize the tincture squaddies to put them back on the roof. Heaven knows, there’s enough squaddies to do the job, and being so tiny, they weigh hardly anything. The rest of the damage to the inside of StregaSchloss can wait.”
Taking Latch’s silence for assent, Sab assembled his troops. “Right, Tock, let’s go. Back to the lochside. We need to pick the slates up and bring them back here. Ffup, you sort the squaddies out, would you? Since they originally came from your teeth, they ought to obey you without question. . . .”
In the wine cellar, Titus took a deep breath to steel himself for the task ahead and opened the lid to the freezer. At his feet, Multitudina meditatively nibbled on the corner of a frozen fish finger. True to the promise he’d made in the dungeons, Titus had emptied the freezer of a box of fish fingers, a brace of game pies, several tubs of ice cream, and twenty or so assorted unlabeled bags of leftovers. Now he peered into the freezer, where Strega-Nonna lay enshrined in tinfoil, her silver hair forming a frosty corona around her little walnut-wrinkled face. Strega-Nonna was the most ancient resident at StregaSchloss, her history forever entwined with that of the house itself, her encyclopedic knowledge making her the family’s living archive. On several occasions, she had been known to defrost herself and arrive unannounced in their midst, an anachronistic reminder of their eventual wrinkly fate. Unable to let go her hold on life, even the half-life of the cryogenically preserved, she clung on determinedly, at first suspended in icebergs, then kept in the old ice house on the grounds of StregaSchloss, and finally, with the advent of domestic refrigeration, entombed in the deep freeze, hoping that one day science would find a cure for old age.
Titus’s breath formed misty clouds around her as she gazed up at him. “Nonna . . . ,” he began, “how d’you fancy some company in there?”
Strega-Nonna sighed. Company? She considered this. It had been centuries since she’d entertained any form of company worth considering. “What did you have in mind, child?” She shifted her weight and pulled out a bag of frozen peas from under her arm and passed them out to Titus.
“Three hundred and eighty-two very small geriatrics,” Titus said, dropping the peas near Multitudina. “Or, at least, they look like geriatrics, even if they’re only three days old.”
“How small?” said Strega-Nonna. “There isn’t all that much room in here.”
“Tiny. No bigger than your hand. And there’s heaps of space now that I’ve removed all the food.”
“Right now?” Strega-Nonna said, considering this possibility. “I’ll have to tidy this place up a bit, dust, vacuum, that sort of thing. . . .”
“So, is that a yes?”
“I’ll give it a go,” said Strega-Nonna. “But I reserve the right to evict them if things don’t work out. Now shut the lid, child. I’m beginning to thaw. . . .”
Titus closed the freezer lid and groaned. Time to explain to Mrs. McLachlan exactly where the clones had come from, and take her advice on whether to phone Signor and Signora Strega-Borgia or let them sleep on in blissful ignorance. And, Titus reminded himself, he really ought to apologize to Latch for using his socks as a rudimentary form of clone clothing. He turned toward the kitchen, where he found Pandora and Mrs. McLachlan devouring the remnants of a packet of digestive biscuits with a freshly made pot of tea.
The nanny met Titus’s eye, waved her hand in the direction of several clones sleeping in little heaps round the kitchen, and raised one eyebrow inquiringly. While Latch snored with his head on the table, Titus began to explain what on earth had possessed him to think that cloning himself and his sister was A Good Idea. Somehow, in the soporific warmth of the kitchen, the nightmarish quality of the whole clone episode seemed far away, like a bad dream. Mrs. McLachlan murmured sympathetically, the rewound clock over the mantelpiece measured out the minutes, Damp lay tucked snugly under a mound of tea towels in the cutlery drawer, and Ffup’s egg took pride of place, set in a copper jelly pan, hung on a hook over the range.
During a pause in Titus’s narrative, they all heard the clatter of a vehicle coming round the back of the house. Outside the kitchen window, Vincent Bella-Vista’s van lurched to a standstill and Knot, his fur alive with clones, fell out of the driver’s door onto the rose quartz. The passenger door opened and Sab emerged, shaking from head to tail.
“I’ll do the driving next time, pal,” he advised. “I thought we were going to die back there.”
“I can’t see what I’m doing,” Knot complained, brushing clones away from his eyes. “It’s all these wee things. They’re all over me—eurchhh, get off!”
The unwanted clones gathered their socks and ponchos about themselves and headed indoors for warmth.
“FFUP!” bawled Sab. “Here’s the first batch of slates. Come and get them.” The griffin turned and opened the van’s rear doors and began to remove slates from its interior and stack them on the driveway.
Ffup swooped down the south face of StregaSchloss to the rapturous applause of the entire battalion of tincture squaddies, lifted a hundredweight of slates in her talons, and flew back up more sedately to where the squaddies waited to begin work on the roof. Leaving the remaining slates to be airlifted roofward, Sab and Knot climbed back in the van and headed down to the loch for more. Despite the now continual hammering from the roof, Mrs. McLachlan, Titus, and Pandora joined the sleepers in the kitchen, twitching and snoring in the warmth from the range. The racket of the arriving and departing builder’s van failed to wake them as Knot and Sab brought twelve more loads of slates back to StregaSchloss, finally returning just before dawn with Tock shivering and dripping as he clung to the roof rack.
Deep-Frozen Dollies
A faint pink glow could just be seen over the treetops when Damp woke up. During the night, several clones had crawled into the cutlery drawer beside her, and were now curled round her legs, eyes tight shut, their faint whispery breath barely audible.
Funny dollies, Damp decided, prodding one to see how it worked.
The Pandora type opened its eyes and gave a disgruntled hiss. “What a night,” it groaned, to Damp’s delight. “Eeeeh, I’m stiff. Must be the arthritis. . . .” And off it staggered, clambering painfully over the edge of the cutlery drawer and groaning pitifully as it hobbled across the floor. Mystified, Damp crawled out of the drawer and followed the escaped dolly over to where it halted at the range, using the coal bucket as a mirror and bemoaning the state of its gray hair, which was coming out in handfuls.
Broken dolly, Damp thought with regret, Nanny fix it. She padded across to where Mrs. McLachlan slept on the settle and crawled into her lap.
Overhead, the banging and hammering ceased. The change in background noise level served as a trigger to wake everyone up. Before removing themselves to the Auchenlochtermuchty Arms, the family had stored all their mattresses in the bed attic, their linen in the linen cupboard, and every pillow that had ever graced the beds in StregaSchloss had been sent away for re-covering and cleaning. Consequently, sleeping in the warmth of the kitchen rather than in their bare and arctic bedrooms had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now, stiff and sore after a night spent on hard chairs, Mrs. McLachlan and Latch were not inclined to be cheerful.
“Where are those pestilential beasts?” muttered Latch, opening the range and riddling the ashes within. Lifting the mirror-gazing clone to one side, he emptied the contents of the coal bucket into the firebox and slammed the range door shut with a kick. “I’m going to the coal shed. Would someone please put the kettle on for some coffee?”
His clattering and banging woke the clones. They were dotted here and there around the kitchen, some in drawers, some camped i
n mixing bowls, some draped across chairs, and even one sock-clad Pandora type hanging from a cup hook in the china cupboard. They groaned and wheezed in concert, alerting Titus to their parlous state.
“They’ve grown old,” he said, realizing that their gray hair was due not to a lack of personal hygiene, but to a case of accelerated aging. “Oh, the poor things, how awful.”
Pandora rescued the clone beside the range and sat with it in her hands, patting its head as if affection alone could turn back the clock. Titus watched aghast as his once bouncy and lithe creations stooped and hobbled around the kitchen, sharing the ghastly details of their current decrepitude with everyone within earshot.
Titus tried to shut his ears but it proved impossible.
“Gout in my toes—ohh, the agony. Can’t hardly walk with the pain. . . .”
“I think I’m coming down with a chest infection—can’t breathe properly.”
“You should moan, I can’t see with these cataracts.”
“Influenza . . . might even be pneumonia. . . .”
“On the other hand, might be a touch of emphysema, or maybe bronchitis. . . .”
On and on they droned, each vying with the next in its catalogue of ailments, with Titus growing more suicidal at each new revelation. “Oh, what have I done?” he wailed, racked with guilt about the true cost of his dabblings in bioengineering.
Mrs. McLachlan paused en route to the bathroom with Damp in her arms. “It’s a hard lesson you’re learning, laddie,” she said, wrapping her arm around Titus and giving him a hug. “To watch those we love grow old and frail is part of life itself—it prepares us for the fate that we all inherit. . . . It’s just that you’re a wee bit young to have to face such things. You’re still at the stage where you’re determined never to grow old. . . .”
Damp reached out and patted Titus on the cheek. Titus leaking, she decided, batting tears off his nose with a chubby fist.
“By the time it’s your turn,” Mrs. McLachlan continued, “you’ll realize that old age isn’t half as bad as you thought. In fact, believe it or not, you’ll look back to when you were a laddie and think, ‘Thank heavens I’ll never have to be twelve ever again.’ It’s not all doom and gloom, you know. Old age has its compensations. . . .” She bore Damp off upstairs, leaving Titus and Pandora to their thoughts.