Floods 6

by Colin Thompson

  After eleven minutes, just as Mordonna was about to do her geography teacher spell, the two seagulls returned and dropped the Queen’s thigh bone at Winchflat’s feet.

  ‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ said Mordonna after she had turned the others back into seagulls. ‘Next time you’re thinking about stealing a bone, make sure the creature it belongs to has finished with it. Now off you go and fly along the beach. Whoever drops the biggest mess on a sunbathing tummy will get this lovely big prawn.’

  ‘This holiday stuff’s fun, isn’t it?’ she said when the birds had flown off.

  All along the beach there were angry cries as everyone got dive-bombed by the seagulls.

  Winchflat, who had stayed behind in the hotel checking his email, now joined his family on the beach. He seemed to have collected a troupe of small boys, who were trailing behind him with their mouths open and pointing. This was because Winchflat was entirely encased in a massive ancient deep-sea diving suit with huge lead boots and a big brass helmet with a thick glass window. Winchflat stopped beside his parents and opened his window.

  ‘I’m going for a swim,’ he said. ‘I may be some time.’

  ‘Don’t you need a boat with an air compressor and thick hoses to send air down to you?’ said Mr Hulbert, who could remember seeing something similar in a book when he had been at school.

  ‘Normally, yes,’ said Winchflat, ‘but I’ve made a few modifications. I will generate my own air internally.’

  ‘Yeuww,’ said Betty. ‘That’s gross.’

  Winchflat closed his window and went down to the water’s edge.25 As he walked into the waves, the weight of his diving suit made him sink deeper and deeper into the sand. So by the time he had walked out about twenty metres, he was stuck fast and the only bit of him that wasn’t buried was his head. And there he stayed as the waves crashed over him.

  ‘I’m sure he knows what he’s doing,’ said Mordonna, who could not believe Winchflat could make a mistake.

  None of them could. Since he had been a baby, Winchflat had been the family genius. He had only put a foot wrong once and that had been when he had been building his girlfriend Igorina and had put the left foot on the right leg. Even then he claimed he had done it for artistic reasons and not because he had made a mistake.

  ‘With her feet on opposite legs,’ he had claimed, ‘if she ever tries to run away, she’ll just keep ending up back here.’

  ‘I guess the seagull standing on Winchflat’s head is probably part of a brilliant experiment,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘It’s probably something to do with sand,’ said Merlinmary. ‘He’s probably studying the interactions between the grains in a sort of space–time continuum kind of way, taking into account the ectoplasmic gaps and interdependent relationship between the, umm, er…’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Betty.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Merlinmary, ‘but I heard Winchflat say it once.’

  ‘Well, I think he’s stuck,’ said Betty.

  ‘Sweetheart, he’s a wizard,’ said Mordonna. ‘Of course he’s not stuck. All he has to do is click his fingers and say a spell and he can be out of there in a second.’

  ‘No, he’s stuck,’ Betty insisted. ‘And he’s stuck so fast he can’t even move his fingers to click them.’

  ‘I suppose you could be right,’ Mordonna admitted. ‘We’ll just leave him there a bit longer and see if he is or not.’

  ‘How much longer?’ said Betty as the tide came in a bit more and began to cover Winchflat’s window. ‘That man’s just tied his boat up to that ring on top of Winchflat’s helmet and the whole thing will be completely under water soon.’

  As the tide turned, Betty waded out into the water and tapped on the top of the helmet.

  ‘Are you stuck?’ she shouted.

  Winchflat was stuck like toffee to a blanket, but he refused to admit it. He shook his head.

  ‘See,’ said Mordonna when Betty returned. ‘I told you he wasn’t stuck.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ said Betty, ‘but if that’s how he wants it, fine. We’ll just leave him there.’

  And then everyone went to sleep for the rest of the afternoon.26 Then they woke up and went back to the hotel for dinner which, because it was mostly human food and not wizard food, the Floods wished they had stayed asleep for. Except for the bit when Valla did a magic spell that made all of the wax in all the diners’ ears fly across the dining room towards the dessert trolley and mix itself into the trifle.

  ‘This,’ said Mr Hulbert to his wife, ‘is the best trifle I have ever tasted, just like your mother’s.’

  Even Merlinmary’s miniature sharks in everyone’s coffee cups couldn’t top the trifle trick.

  Around two o’clock in the morning, a shoal of Blue Burrowing Stupid Fish27 burrowed down past Winchflat’s right hand, which gave him enough movement inside his diving suit to click his fingers and get himself free. By the time everyone woke up the next morning, he had got rid of the diving suit and pretended nothing had happened.

  ‘Well, it’s nice to know that he’s human like the rest of us,’ Nerlin said to Mordonna over breakfast, ‘and not some super-genius.’

  ‘The rest of us aren’t human,’ said Mordonna. ‘We’re witches and wizards.’

  After breakfast, Betty and Ffiona raced back to the beach again. There was a big sign stuck into the sand. It said:

  All along the beach there were groups of children digging holes and piling buckets of sand on top of each other. Most of the castles were pretty ordinary: a tower at each corner and a moat round the outside where younger brothers and sisters kept pouring water they’d brought in buckets from the sea. Of course, since sand is useless at holding water, no sooner had they tipped the water in than it soaked away. One or two children had tried to be clever and dug a canal down to the water’s edge so that as each wave landed on the shore some of its water ran into the moat. This meant that those castles got washed away because the tide was coming in. The day was not only destined to end in tears, but start and continue in tears too.

  ‘Look at them all,’ said Betty as she and Ffiona walked along the beach. ‘They’re useless.’

  ‘I bet we could do better,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘We could do much better than better,’ said Betty, ‘especially if we use a little bit of magic.’

  ‘I thought your mum banned you from doing magic ’cause it always goes wrong.’

  ‘Not always,’ said Betty. ‘Anyway, we’ll only use a little bit of magic and we won’t tell her. No one will know.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘We’ll go up the far end of the beach,’ said Betty. ‘It’s quieter along there. Can you run back and ask Winchflat if he’ll give us a hand? We could do with a couple of his inventions.’

  The one type of magic that Betty was very good at was housework, though of course housework is not so much magic as a terrible curse. Mordonna had made sure very early on that this was an area where Betty would always get it right so she would never have an excuse not to take the rubbish out or shampoo the rats.28 So while Ffiona ran to get Winchflat, Betty flattened a large patch of sand near the water’s edge until it was as smooth as a fresh bedspread.

  ‘Hey, stupid,’ said a boy who was walking by. ‘Are you going to build a castle there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Betty, ‘I am and it will be the biggest and best castle you have ever seen.’

  ‘I don’t think so, stupid,’ said the boy. ‘The tide will wash it all away before lunchtime.’

  ‘The tide will not touch one grain of sand on my castle,’ said Betty. ‘It will flow into my moat, run round the castle walls and run away again. Which is what you should do.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of you, stupid.’

  Why is it that wherever you go in the world there is always a really dim-witted, spotty little boy who thinks he’s really clever? Betty thought. She couldn’t be bothered to argue with the boy. She just clicked her fingers
and ten angry crabs ran out of the sea and clamped onto each of the boy’s toes. This made the boy cry and fall on the ground, where one of the crabs decided it would be happier biting his nose rather than his little toe.

  ‘MUUUMMMM!’ the boy cried, but the wind was blowing in the opposite direction so his mother couldn’t hear him.

  ‘Now, now, little sister,’ said Winchflat as he returned with Ffiona. ‘Let the spotty boy go.’

  Betty grumpily released the crabs, but Winchflat could see she wasn’t quite finished.

  ‘No, Betty,’ he warned. ‘There’s no point in making him wet himself, he’s got his swimmers on and they’re wet already.’

  Betty let the boy go, but she had her extra bit of revenge on him after all, watching his mother smack him for telling her that the pretty blonde girl with the big innocent eyes had made ten crabs bite him.

  ‘Don’t be so wicked,’ his mother said. ‘How can anyone make crabs bite you?’

  ‘Did Ffiona tell you what we’re going to do?’ said Betty as the spotty boy threw himself on top of his little sister’s sandcastle in a terrible tantrum.

  ‘Yes, she did,’ said Winchflat. ‘So I popped back home in my Zoomy Thing and made a couple of things to help you.’

  The first one looked just like the sort of bucket you would use for making sandcastles, except that each time you tipped the sand out, it instantly filled itself up again without you having to do it.

  The second invention was something that was guaranteed to make Betty and Ffiona’s castle one that would not only win the competition, but be remembered for many, many years to come.

  Winchflat’s iGlueatron could stick absolutely ANYTHING to ANYTHING else. You could stick water to the ceiling, jelly to a non-stick saucepan, and kittens to clouds. It could even stick brains inside a politician’s head, but you had to put a lot of white ants in the politician’s ear first to eat all the wood that was filling up the space where normal people kept their brains.

  ‘Do you think we should wait until it’s dark?’ said Ffiona. ‘I mean, we don’t want to attract a crowd.’

  ‘Well, it would be kind of cool for everyone to come down tomorrow morning and find it here,’ said Betty, ‘but the competition finishes this afternoon, so if we want to win that, we’ve got to do it now.’

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Winchflat, trying to restore his genius image after his swimming mistake. ‘In fact, I’ve got thousands of ideas and they keep rushing round inside my head and crashing into each other and having baby ideas so I end up with more and more of them … but I do have two ideas to do with building your sandcastle.’

  ‘What are they?’ said Betty.

  ‘Well, the first one is that we could all get inside my Zoomy Thing and go to the Sahara Desert to visit my old friend Lord Clacton. We could build the castle there and then bring it back here.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said Ffiona. ‘That machine of yours makes me travel sick.’

  ‘OK then,’ said Winchflat. ‘Plan B. You start building the castle and if people get inquisitive, I’ll cover the sky with thunderclouds that’ll make it as dark as night. If that doesn’t keep them away, I’ll make the clouds rain like the Niagara Falls.’

  ‘Won’t that wash our castle away?’ said Ffiona.

  ‘No, because it won’t rain within the small circle where we are and also because my iGlueatron will make your castle totally one hundred per cent waterproof,’ Winchflat explained. ‘So even if the tide comes in and covers it, not one single grain of sand will move.’

  ‘Wow,’ said the two girls and started building.

  At first their sandcastle looked like most of the others along the beach, with buckets of sand tipped out to make little towers and holes poked in them with little fingers to look like windows. But soon Betty and Ffiona got into the rhythm and began to progress beyond that, with the help of Winchflat’s inventions. Their towers grew taller. The windows all looked like proper castle windows with round tops and fancy carving round the edges and, if you looked closely, there even seemed to be lights on in some of the windows.

  As they added more and more, their sandcastle became a scale model of Castle Twilight, the ancient home of the Kings of Transylvania Waters, where Mordonna had grown up.

  This was amazing because neither Winchflat nor Betty had ever been there or even seen a picture of the place, but obviously the image of this incredible and unique building was buried in their genes. And Ffiona didn’t even know there was such a place as Castle Twilight.

  As the sandcastle reached shoulder height, a few people began to show interest and walk along the beach towards them. They were mostly the parents of children whose own castles were nowhere near as good. There was also a small brown dog who thought the castle looked like a tree and was overcome with an uncontrollable need to pee on it. When he did, there was a little flash of lightning and the dog ran off yelping in a cloud of scorched fur.

  Seeing the crowd start to gather around them, Winchflat muttered under his breath and the sky grew as dark as night. Most people ran up the beach to take shelter, but a few still came nearer. Winchflat muttered another spell and it began to rain, not a few drops building up into a storm but an instant torrential downpour like a burst water tank. It came down so heavily and so suddenly that everyone out in it was soaked to the skin in two seconds. It rained so hard that it got into the Guinness Book of Records. Other places it got included everyone’s ears, which filled up and then overflowed down their necks. It was pointless trying to run for cover, though everyone did.29 Everyone except Winchflat, Betty and Ffiona, who stayed perfectly dry in their little circle of sunshine.

  ‘Won’t all the other sandcastles get completely flattened?’ said Ffiona.

  ‘No, I thought about that,’ said Winchflat. ‘You’re going to win anyway and it seemed really mean to wash all the others away, so I diverted the rain away from each one.’

  It was true. Although the rain was so thick no one could see through it, directly above each castle was a little circle of clear sky.

  As Betty and Ffiona added more and more turrets and castellations to their creation, it changed from being fantastic to being brilliant and finally it became a totally awesome masterpiece. The sea did, as Betty had predicted, flow in to fill the moat and, unlike everyone else’s castle, the water stayed there. There were tiny baby sharks swimming round and round the castle, and a little drawbridge. And even though the tide was still rising, it didn’t remove a single grain of sand from the enchanted model. The sand itself took on a magical quality, allowing the girls to mould and model it with incredible detail. They even changed the colour of the sand, so the roofs were grey like the lead of the original Castle Twilight.30 The castle walls were not simply smoothed flat sand, but had all the lines where the stones joined together. If anyone had looked really closely, they would have seen that there was moss growing between the stones.

  The finished sandcastle was a magnificent achievement. If it was a Rolls Royce, then all the other castles along the beach were bicycles with punctured tyres and rusty handlebars.

  And yes, there really were lights on in some of the windows and mysterious moving shadows in some of the rooms, as if there were real miniature people inside. This effect was created by Winchflat, who had dressed a team of hermit crabs in tiny costumes and trained them to walk upright on their back claws, but you had to look really, really close to tell.

  Winchflat took a tiny Transylvania Waters flag out of his pocket and stuck it in the roof of the tallest tower.

  ‘There we are,’ he said. ‘Finished.’

  He clicked his fingers and it stopped raining. He clicked them again and the black clouds formed a long line and went off to rain on Belgium, which was a shame because stage two of that year’s Tour de France cycling race was going through there that very day.

  At five o’clock the judges walked along the beach looking at each of the thirty-two sandcastles. Thirty-one of them got equal second prize, which wa
s a bucket and spade and a DVD called How to Build Sandcastles. Betty and Ffiona’s castle won, in a judges’ decision that was almost unanimous except that one judge had a son who had built one of the other castles, so he wouldn’t vote for Betty and Ffiona’s castle even though it was clearly the best.31

  The first prize was a family ticket to the local theatre to see the current seaside holiday show.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Betty and Ffiona, neither of whom had been to the theatre before.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Mordonna, Nerlin and everyone else when they showed them the ticket. No one else in the family, apart from Queen Scratchrot, had ever been to the theatre either.

  ‘I went to the theatre lots of times when I was young,’ said the Queen.

  ‘Really, I didn’t know that,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘It was before you were born,’ said the Queen. ‘In fact, it was where I met your father.’

  ‘What did you go to see, Granny?’ said Merlinmary.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t go to see anything,’ said the Queen. ‘I was on the stage. I was one of the actors in a group of travelling players called the Mysterious Monarchs. All the actors were princes and princesses and we performed wonderful magical plays and exotic variety shows.’

  ‘Wow, Granny, who would have thought?’ said Betty.

  ‘Well, not me,’ said Mordonna. ‘Why haven’t you ever told us about it before?’

  ‘Well, it all came to a rather tragic end,’ said the Queen, ‘and I’d rather not talk about it.’

  ‘Oh go on,’ said everyone, ‘please.’

  ‘No, it’s too upsetting,’ said the Queen.

  ‘We’ll polish your bones with linseed oil,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘And beeswax,’ said Betty.

  ‘With live bees?’ said the Queen.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ said the Queen, arranging her loose bones as tidily as she could before pulling the zip in the top of the backpack tight around her neck.