In one last brilliant circuit it left the track completely and soared up into the sky. It looped the loop over seven clouds, stood on its end, waited a second and then came screaming back towards the fairground so fast that it broke the sound barrier.
It shot round the track once more and then came to a nice slow stop at the finishing line.
Mordonna hadn’t thought to do the I-Will-Not-Puke-Ever-At-All-Spell on Mrs Hulbert, which was a pity, because when she had seen her daughter vanishing into the clouds as the roller-coaster went higher and higher, she went extremely white and threw up into her handbag.
‘Wow, that was totally brilliant,’ said Ffiona as she and Betty staggered around trying to get their balance back.
‘Yeah,’ said Betty. ‘Now let’s go and trash some boys on the dodgems before the circus starts.’
Even Ffiona could have trashed the boys, because when boys get into small cars they usually become very stupid.40 So it wasn’t really necessary for Betty to make massively thick sticky cobwebs full of horrible, biting, but not fatal, spiders fall down on each dodgem car until all seventeen cars with spotty young macho idiot boys driving them were completely jammed together like fish in a net.
‘Have you ever set fire to a cobweb?’ said Betty as she pulled up alongside the tangled mess.
‘No,’ said Ffiona. ‘What happens?’
‘This,’ said Betty and struck a match.
Of course she didn’t really set the cobwebs on fire. She just held the flame close enough to make every single boy wet himself.
‘Come on,’ she said to Ffiona, ‘the circus is about to start.’
The circus was one of those old-fashioned ones where wild animals are forced to do demeaning tricks, such as opening their mouths while their trainers put their heads in them or walking around on their hind legs dressed in human clothes.
Naturally, wizard circuses do not do this sort of thing. Wizard circuses have wizards doing incredible things, which the audience can do because they are all wizards too, but which everyone still enjoys seeing. Wizard clowns don’t have red noses, big shoes and funny clothes. They all dress up like bank managers and lend each other money or else stick each other into filing cabinets. Wizard circuses do have some performing animals, but they fall into one of two categories. The first category is sheep and chickens, who are too stupid to realise they are being exploited, but are clever enough to realise that performing in a circus is probably better than getting roasted in an oven and covered in gravy. The other category is performing humans, who are also too stupid to realise they are being exploited, which is why TV shows like Big Brother and Idol are so successful.41
The circus at the Port Folio funfair was not a wizard circus. It was the worst sort, full of depressed animals, and the Floods decided they would have to do something about it.
‘Are you going to get the lion to close its mouth when the trainer puts his head inside it?’ said Ffiona, when Betty told her their plans.
‘No, tempting as it is, biting human heads off would probably be going a bit too far. Yes, it would be very entertaining with all that blood and guts, but the audience are mostly human and humans are a bit squeamish. I don’t think they’d enjoy it very much,’ said Betty. ‘What usually happens in this sort of situation is that Mum casts a few spells to reverse everyone’s roles.’
First of all some clowns came on and drove round the circus ring in their silly car with wheels that fell off. Then they threw water at each other and tripped over each other’s great big clown shoes, usually landing face-down in custard pies. No animals were hurt or insulted during this bit.
But then the ringmaster stood in the centre of the ring and cracked a big whip as six beautiful white horses ran round and round, each one with a small poodle on its back.
Now, as anyone who owns a labrador knows, some animals actually like doing stupid things to make their humans happy. So before she did any circus magic, Mordonna looked inside each performing animal’s head to see if they were happy or sad. Then she made her adjustments.
‘They all hate the whip,’ Mordonna whispered, ‘and the ringmaster’s wife doesn’t give them enough to eat. Those poodles are quite a bit more intelligent than she is, too.’
So as the ringmaster flicked his whip back for another big crack, the three-metre braided leather thong wrapped itself round his body and slapped him across the face. At the same time the six poodles stood on their hind legs and clapped with their front paws.
What happened next:
The horses raced out of the ring, galloped across the paddock, through the gate and away into the vast forest behind the town, where they still live to this day, eating soft green grass and leaves, drinking crystal clear water from mountain streams, raising a new generation of beautiful wild foals and generally thinking to themselves, Life does not get any better than this.
As the horses had run away through the town, the poodles had leapt off their backs and all six of them had ended up living with a little old lady who fed them lightly poached chicken and cuddled them in a big soft armchair in front of a big log fire.
Like the horses, the poodles and the little old lady all thought, Life does not get any better than this.
And of course they were right.
The ringmaster had a nasty red weal across his face from his whip that never quite faded. Circus ringmasters are quite often incredibly vain and pompous people who even go to bed in their top hats. This one was like that and, after Mordonna had given him exactly what he deserved for cracking a big whip at defenceless animals for twenty-seven years, he left the circus and moved away as far as he could from everyone to a remote run-down property where he spent the rest of his life growing rhubarb that was so sour no amount of sugar could improve it. His wife, who was just as vain, decided she could not love a man with a red scar on his face because it would clash with her new lipstick, so she ran away with the rhubarb inspector from a large supermarket chain and lived miserably ever after.
It rained a lot on the rhubarb farm and the ringmaster sat on his verandah staring out at his fields of mud and rhubarb and thought, It can’t get any worse than this. Then the verandah collapsed on his head and he realised it could.
The next act was some acrobats. There were no animals in the act, but the acrobats were not very good. The only highlight was when one of them fell off, and even that wasn’t so great because there was a safety net, so the only thing that got broken was a fingernail.
But then three of the clowns came back and this time they had five chimpanzees with them. The apes were dressed in copies of what the clowns were wearing – baggy trousers with big red spots and orange braces and silly bow ties.
Mordonna concentrated.
‘The chimpanzees are really angry,’ she whispered. ‘They were all taken away from their families when they were babies and have never seen them since. This will take a bit of sorting out.’
‘Will it be difficult to find their parents?’ said Betty.
‘No, that bit’s easy,’ said Mordonna. ‘I can do a quick DNA test, transport it to a laboratory in the Congo and get them to do comparison tests on the International Chimpanzee DNA Database. We can do that before the first custard pie falls inside the first pair of clown trousers.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘None of them want to go back to the Congo,’ said Mordonna. ‘They want to stay here and get revenge and they want to get it over and over again.’
She clicked her fingers and the oldest chimp came over and climbed into her lap. As chimp and witch communicated telepathically, one of the clowns came marching over with a very angry look on his face.
‘What do you think you are doing?’ he snapped and, under his breath, he added, ‘Just you wait until later, you little troublemaker.’
As he reached out for the chimp it screamed at him and bit him on the hand. The clown jumped backwards, tripped over his big silly clown shoes and fell flat on his back. Two other chimps raced over
and threw custard pies at the fallen clown. Then the first chimp wiped them all over the clown’s face…
…with her bottom.
The audience exploded with laughter. They all thought it was part of the show. As the two other clowns ran over, Mordonna clicked her fingers again and their trousers fell down, making them fall flat on their faces. The five chimpanzees ran round the circus ring grabbing all the ice-creams off the audience and throwing them at the three clowns. When the children saw what the chimps wanted them for, they were only too happy to hand them over.
Now, what most people don’t realise is that chimpanzees can actually talk and are a lot more intelligent than many human beings. They just pretend they can only grunt and aren’t very bright to avoid the millions of problems that speaking with mankind would bring them. So while Mordonna was tempted to get the leading chimp to speak, she didn’t. She sent her thoughts out into the fairground and searched through all the people working there until she found one with a kind heart. There were quite a few people with kind hearts, but Mordonna needed just the right one. She found the perfect person: Carla Divine, a girl of eighteen who wanted to be a clown, but wasn’t allowed to because she was a girl.
While the five chimpanzees kept the three human clowns pinned to the floor with biting, bottom wiping and screaming, Mordonna cast her spell. Carla Divine left the coconut shy where she was working and went back to her caravan. She locked the door and put on the secret clown costume she had made herself, but never told a single soul about. Whenever she put on the big, baggy red silk trousers and the huge spotty bow tie and the funny shoes, she was overcome with a feeling of extreme happiness. Once she had completed the picture by putting on the makeup with the big red clown grin, a little voice inside her head kept saying, It doesn’t get any better than this, over and over again.
Then she marched into the circus tent and into the middle of the ring. Instantly the five chimps rushed up to her and kissed her hands. The chimps adored her because she had always treated them as her equals and preferred to be with them than most of the humans in the circus. This was because chimps, like labradors, spend huge amounts of time thinking, It doesn’t get any better than this.42
The audience cheered and cheered.
Carla drank in the applause for a few minutes and then held up her hand. You could have heard a pin drop.
‘Well, boys and girls,’ said Carla Divine. ‘What do we have here?’
The chimps jumped up and down and pointed at the three sticky, sawdust-covered clowns, who kept trying to stand up only to fall flat on their faces again. If it looked like one of them might manage to get to his feet, one of the chimps would bite him on the ankle.
‘We have three very dirty clowns, haven’t we, boys and girls,’ Carla continued. ‘And what do we do with someone when they get dirty?’
‘BATH! WASH!’ shouted eighty-seven hyperactive children.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Carla, ‘and with lots of water.’
Three of the chimps ran out of the ring. They ran back a minute later, each dragging a big hose.
‘WASH, WASH, WASH, WASH!’ chanted the audience in time to Carla waving her arms up and down.
While the clowns were being hosed down, the little girl sitting in the row in front of the Floods turned to her father. ‘That was, like, the best circus I have ever been to,’ she said. ‘The chimpanzees were brilliant.’
What happened next:
The man who owned the circus knew a good thing when he saw it and Carla Divine was promoted from polishing coconuts to being chief clown. She was given a brand new caravan with enough room for her and the five chimpanzees to live in and, as the six of them sat around her stove toasting marshmallows, they all thought, Life does not get any better than this, together.
And of course they were right.
The three mean clowns were allowed to stay on as Carla Divine’s assistants. You might think that they would never agree to that, but Mordonna cast a spell over them so they all thought that Carla Divine was a genius and the highlight of their week became giving the chimps a bubble bath on Friday nights.
Of course, the Floods didn’t interfere with the acrobats or high-wire act.
‘If humans want to risk serious injury to themselves, that’s up to them,’ said Mordonna. ‘Though I think we need to get rid of the bouncing kittens. I’m sure they can’t enjoy being dropped onto a trampoline from twenty metres in the air.’
‘No,’ said Betty, ‘but they do look funny going up and down waving their little legs around, don’t they?’
‘Now, darling, that’s not very nice, is it?’ said Mordonna, doing her best not to laugh.
‘Sorry,’ said Betty.
‘She’s right, though, Mum,’ said Morbid. ‘They look hilarious.’
‘Yes,’ said Satanella, ‘and besides, cats are evil little creatures. They’re always trying to scratch me when I chase them.’
All of this was true, but it was cruel, and so Mordonna changed them into chickens.
‘Which is probably just as cruel,’ said Nerlin, ‘but even funnier than the kittens.’
‘Sorry,’ said Mordonna. ‘I am a witch. I am supposed to be a bit evil – and anyway, the one thing chickens spend every minute thinking about is being able to fly, and now they can. Sort of.’
After the horse and poodle and clown fiascos, the circus owner almost cancelled the highlight of his show, the lions.
‘The way things are going tonight,’ he said, ‘it could end in serious injury to someone.’
But, like most so-called ‘lion tamers’, the Port Folio Circus’s lion tamer was a short little macho loser who would never admit to being afraid of anything.
That was his first mistake.
As the lion tamer paraded around the ring, pushing out his chest and cracking his whip, the huge steel fence was locked into place and the three lions were pushed down the tunnel into the spotlight.
The lion tamer cracked his whip and the lions roared. Most people think that circus lions roar because they have been trained to, but they actually roar because they are miserable and angry. It’s only the whip and the tranquilisers that have been slipped into their water bowls that stop them acting like lions are supposed to.
When the three lions were all sitting on their round boxes, the lion tamer stood in the middle of the ring and lifted his right arm above his head to give his whip a great crack to prove how macho he was. Just before the whip came down again, Mordonna clicked her fingers and the braided leather thongs turned into braided antelope’s intestines43 dripping with blood and smelling very, very delicious.44
It was hard to tell who moved the quickest, the three lions or the lion tamer. It was all a blur as they fled down the tunnel. Actually, it was only the lion tamer who fled. The lions chased.
What happened next:
Actually, what happened next cannot be written down for the following reasons:
My publisher wouldn’t let me as this is a children’s book.
You can guess anyway.
Any really nasty, vicious stuff might not be too good for Mordonna’s image.
But everyone lived happily ever after, sort of. The lions were taken to a lovely huge wildlife park, which was better than going back to the wild because they didn’t have to go and hunt for their dinner.
They spent their afternoons lying in the shade of a big tree thinking, Life does not get any better than this.
They also thought, I never realised that lion tamer could give you such indigestion.
The final act of the circus, which would have included the horses and poodles and lions, was a bit of an anti-climax.
What normally happened was that pigeons were released and flew around the big top in a terrified flock, crashing into the ropes and poles before taking refuge on a perch right in the very top of the tent. Mordonna knew that there was only one way to get them down from there. After everyone had left, the circus owner would open the tap on a big cylinder of sleepi
ng gas. The gas would drift up to the top of the tent and make all the pigeons pass out. One by one they would fall off the perch and fall down into the safety net, from where they would be stuffed back into their cages until the next performance. Needless to say, all that gas every day, and twice on Saturdays, made the poor birds feel horribly sick nearly all the time, so there was no way that Mordonna was going to let that happen ever again.
When Mordonna made a hole appear in the canvas, the pigeons couldn’t believe their luck and flew off to join the horses in the forest.45
‘Great show,’ said Betty as they walked back to the hotel.
‘Yeah, cool,’ said Ffiona.
‘Certainly not what I expected,’ said Mrs Hulbert.
Although Valla loved his family, he was by nature a solitary being. He imagined that one day he would meet the right girl and fall in love and get married. He realised that as the eldest of the Flood children it was his responsibility to carry on the great name of Flood, but for the moment he was happiest with his own company and the company of mysterious creatures of the night, who were dark and exciting to be with, but not the sort of beings you would marry or even take home to meet Mum and Dad.
So a holiday, to Valla, meant going out after dark and wandering the lanes and alleyways and graveyards of the town. While most of Port Folio was asleep, he made new and exciting friends, many of whom lived under stones or in the dark recesses of family vaults. The undead, the freshly dead and the we-want-to-be-dead-but-cannot-die-because-of-an-evil-curse were the creatures Valla felt at home with. Most of them had long since lost their blood, which meant that Valla was never tempted to sink his teeth into their necks. It never ceased to amaze him that a lot of people didn’t actually enjoy it when he did that.
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