There was something about the cold blue moon shining on the night-time sea that made them feel very relaxed and romantic. The children were back in the hotel. The Hulberts were tucked up in their beds and Queen Scratchrot was quietly disintegrating in her backpack in Winchflat’s wardrobe. It was a peaceful time, when the world was nearly asleep.
On the last night of their holiday, as they were moon-bathing on the beach, the ground wobbled beneath them.
‘What was that?’ said Mordonna.
‘Sorry,’ said Nerlin. ‘Must have been something I ate.’
‘No, not that,’ said Mordonna. ‘That wobble. It wasn’t here. It was miles away. It felt like the world had hiccups.’
‘If you asked me to guess,’ said Nerlin, ‘I would say that a new volcano has just erupted at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean. But then it could just be my imagination.’
‘OH MY GOD, THE MARIANA TRENCH!’ cried Mordonna, sitting bolt upright and staring out to sea.
‘Yes, that’s the place,’ said Nerlin.
‘Oh no,’ said Mordonna.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Nerlin.
‘That’s where the Hearse Whisperer is,’ said Mordonna. ‘Don’t you remember? The children and I lured her into a magic bottle, sealed it shut and buried it at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. We thought it would be most secure place on earth.’53
‘Well, if it’s a magic bottle,’ said Nerlin, ‘I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. All the hot lava has probably sucked it right into the core of the planet where nothing could survive.’
‘The Hearse Whisperer is fireproof,’ said Mordonna. ‘Even her underwear can withstand the strongest furnace. Her knickers are made of the same stuff they stick on the outside of the space shuttle, only without any holes or torn bits.’
‘But surely no living creature could survive boiling lava?’ said Nerlin.
‘I suppose not,’ said Mordonna, though she still looked doubtful.
Something dark staggered out of the water, a huge, menacing silhouette against the moonlit ocean.
The two wizards sat immobile.
Was this the end?
After all their hiding, had the Hearse Whisperer finally found them?
‘Hello, Mum,’ it said. ‘Thanks for that.’
It was Winchflat. The earthquake had shaken him free from the sand.
‘Winchflat, what are you doing going back in the sea when you got stuck the first time?’ said Mordonna.
‘Er, umm, nothing, Mum,’ said Winchflat, blushing inside his diving helmet.
He had gone back because, like his mother, he couldn’t believe one of his inventions hadn’t worked properly. Failure was NOT his middle name and he was determined to have another go at this swimming thing.
‘Anyway, that wobble wasn’t me, darling,’ said Mordonna. ‘It was an earthquake.’
‘Uh oh,’ said Winchflat. ‘Bet it was in the Mariana Trench. You know, I thought this might happen, but I didn’t say anything. I mean, the odds against it were twenty-three billion and fifty-seven to one against it happening, so it didn’t seem very likely, except that twenty-three billion and fifty-seven is the mysterious da Vinci number that has been linked to a whole series of weird, unexplained events over the past four hundred and fifty years.’
‘Come on, stop worrying, said Nerlin. ‘Say the very worst happens and the Hearse Whisperer does escape – she still doesn’t know where we live.’
‘That’s true, but she’s going to be in a really bad mood,’ said Mordonna. ‘I don’t mean the really bad mood that she’s in all the time. I mean the incredibly, unbelievably, horribly bad mood that would make her melt babies and tie angelfish in knots before deep-frying them for lunch.’
‘Yes, yes, but she still doesn’t know how to find us,’ said Nerlin. ‘I mean, she couldn’t find us before, so what makes you think she can now?’
‘I suppose so, but I still have this terrible uneasy feeling,’ she said as they walked back to the hotel for a cup of cocoa.
‘You are such a worrier, Mum,’ said Betty at breakfast the next morning. ‘A bit of an earth tremor and you think the worst.’
… And a massive earthquake occurred last night deep in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, measuring seventeen point two on the Richter Scale, said a voice on the hotel dining room radio, leading to the creation of a completely new island that is now towering over the other fourteen islands in the Marianas…
‘See, I told you,’ said Mordonna.
‘Tears before bedtime,’ said the Queen from her backpack under the table. ‘I can sense it. Have I ever told you that I have an unerring ability to sense impending doom?’
‘Yes, all the time,’ chorused everyone, including the waiter.
Mordonna said she thought they should leave as soon as possible, but the others suggested that there wasn’t much point because if the Hearse Whisperer was going to find them, she had as much or as little chance of doing so in Port Folio as anywhere else.
‘So seeing as how everywhere is as safe as everywhere else, we might as well stay here,’ said Winchflat.
‘Did you bring your Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device?’ said Betty when they had all gone back upstairs.
‘No, I’m afraid I left it in Acacia Avenue,’ said Winchflat. ‘I’ll just have to rely on the detector hairs in my nose. They don’t have the range of my machine, but it’s better than nothing.’
‘Couldn’t you send a signal to Igorina and get her to use the device?’
‘Well, I can send her a signal, no problem,’ said Winchflat. ‘But I have a hard enough time trying to get her to use the toilet, never mind a complicated piece of equipment. Still, I suppose it’s worth a try.’
He switched on his communicator and hunched over the tiny screen, fiddling with the controls.
‘That’s strange,’ he said. ‘I don’t seem to be able to make contact.’
Instead of showing the padded cell at 13 Acacia Avenue that Igorina called home,54 the screen was just a dark swirling mass, like a thunderstorm without the storm or the thunder.
‘That looks like the weather outside,’ said Betty.
Outside the hotel windows, the sky had become as black as night, even though it was only ten o’clock in the morning.
‘This is not good,’ said Mordonna.
The uneasy feeling she had when the deep sea volcano had erupted now advanced past uneasy and on to really scary and needing a cup of very strong tea.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Queen Scratchrot. ‘The impending doom hairs on the back of my neck are wriggling like crazy. I would say that it’s all systems go on impending doom.’
‘It’s just a storm,’ said Nerlin. ‘You women are such worriers.’
‘Those are the exact words that the theatre manager in Silly said to me the night my beloved died,’ said the Queen. ‘And look how that ended.’
A great wind began to blow and behind the hills at the back of Port Folio, far away in the distance in the exact direction of the town where Acacia Avenue was, ferocious flashes of lightning lit up the sky with no gaps between them.
‘This is very not good,’ said Mordonna. ‘This will end in tears long, long before bedtime.’
‘See,’ said the Queen, ‘told you so.’
‘The screen on my Keep-An-Eye-On-Things-At-Home-Scanner has gone dead,’ said Winchflat. ‘And my Keep-An-Eye-On-My-Keep-An-Eye-On-Things-At-Home-Scanner-Scanner is dead too.’
As the whole family waited and worried on the top floor of the Hotel Splendide, Winchflat tapped the screens on his receivers and they all showed the same thing.
Nothing.
‘What about your Keep-An-Eye-On-Your-Keep-An-Eye-On-Your-Keep-An-Eye-On-Things-At-Home-Scanner-Scanner-Scanner?’ said Betty, who knew just how well prepared her brother always was.
‘Dead too,’ said Winchflat, facing the terrible prospect of another invention failure, ‘and so is the backup and the backup-backup.’
/>
Of course, what Winchflat didn’t realise was that all his machines were working perfectly. The ‘nothing’ they could see was not nothing. It was thick black smoke that looked exactly like nothing.
‘I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I can smell smoke,’ said Satanella, who, being a dog, had a sense of smell a hundred times more sensitive than human noses and thirty-seven times better than a wizard.
Ruby and Rosie weren’t worried. They were Jack Russells, and Jack Russells don’t believe in worrying. Ruby and Rosie were running around the hotel biting holes in all the pairs of shoes people had left outside their doors for polishing.
Twelve floors meant eighty-seven pairs of shoes, all demanding to be chewed, run around with, tossed down the stairs and muddled up.
When Mordonna had rescued the two little dogs from the pound and brought them back to the hotel, she had given them the power of speech on the strict condition that they were never to use it when there were any humans around – except in extreme emergencies.
‘You know what?’ said Ruby as she tore the heel off a really, really expensive Manolo Blahnik shoe.
‘What?’ said Rosie as she bit a row of holes in a pair of handmade waterproof boots.
‘Life doesn’t get any better than this!’
‘Right on, sister,’ said Rosie. ‘Let’s go down to the laundry and eat some undies.’
The wind lifted half the sand off the beach and threw it at Belgium. Only Betty and Ffiona’s castle remained untouched, though the trained hermit crabs inside all ran and hid under the miniature beds.
‘It’s the Hearse Whisperer,’ said Mordonna. ‘I know it is. She’s escaped from the magic bottle and is taking it out on the whole world.’
‘Don’t worry, said Nerlin. ‘There’s no way she can find us. We just have to sit tight and wait until she calms down again.’
‘The Hearse Whisperer is never calm,’ said Mordonna. ‘If she has to kill everyone in the whole country to find us, she’ll do it.’
‘Relax, Mother,’ said Valla. ‘She doesn’t even know which country we are in.’
Winchflat went very white, which was actually an improvement on his normal grey-with-green-and-maroon-streaks colour.
‘What is it?’ said Mordonna.
‘She can find us,’ he said. ‘We left her a clue.’
‘What?’ said Mordonna. ‘How…? Why…? I mean, you’re always so careful.’
‘Well, we didn’t think she’d ever, ever be able to escape,’ said Winchflat. ‘After we had trapped her in the bottle on that little island in Tristan da Cunha, I put the bottle in a padded envelope to stop it getting broken while we sent it down to the bottom of the sea.’
‘And you left the padded envelope down there, didn’t you?’ said Morbid.
‘Yes,’ said Winchflat. ‘And because it was an enchanted bottle, it wouldn’t have got broken anyway so we didn’t even need the envelope.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Valla. ‘Was it the envelope I got the free blood samples sent from Paraguay in?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which had our address on it?’
‘Yes,’ said Winchflat, sounding miserable.
Everyone cursed at once with every single swear word they had ever heard.
‘It’ll be all right,’ said Betty. ‘There’s nine of us and only one of her, and we trapped her once, we can do it again.’
‘And we’re not at home,’ said Nerlin cheerfully. ‘So that’s all right.’
Before Mordonna could say anything, something came flying in through the window. The window was shut at the time, so the something flew into the window, smashed the glass with an almighty crash, and then came flying through it. It landed in a heap on the floor.
It was Parsnip.
‘Big panic doing,’ he croaked and fainted.
Mordonna picked up the unconscious bird and tucked him inside her cloak. Soon the warmth of the witch’s body revived him and after a snack of dead mackerel he was back to being as normal as a Transylvanian Crow ever is.
‘Flee doing now,’ he said. ‘Acacia Avenue charcoal being.’
‘What?’
‘Fire, Worse Hisperer playing with matches done. Boom, boom. All gone.’
‘All gone?’ said Mordonna.
‘Huge deep hole, big flame. Snip-Snip even lost dead pigeon dinner,’ said Parsnip.
‘What about our house?’ said Ffiona, who had come rushing in to see what the crashing sound was.
‘Think all right, just thirteen and eleven gone. Snip-Snip not see nineteen in big smoke.’
‘Are we in danger?’ said Mrs Hulbert when Mordonna explained to her what had happened.
Since she had had her beauty treatment that morning, Mrs Hulbert had been floating around the hotel feeling very, very relaxed. In fact she had spent the past few hours on Planet Relaxed, which meant she had been completely unaware of the storm raging outside. She had been lying on her bed drinking champagne and eating chocolates while hippy music floated through her head. She had been idly wondering if she should become a hippy too, and spend the rest of her life in a field full of pretty flowers. The news that large parts of Acacia Avenue, possibly including her own home, had been destroyed, was taking a while to sink in. Mrs Hulbert had more important things to think about, like how soft her skin was and exactly what type of flowers she should grow in her hippy field. It wasn’t until baby Claude realised something strange was going on and bit her on the ankle that she came abruptly back to reality, where all the fields were full of potatoes, without a single flower in sight, not even dandelions.
‘Are we in danger?’ she repeated.
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ said Mordonna. ‘The Hearse Whisperer isn’t after you. She won’t know you have anything to do with us. So if you leave the minibus here and hire a little car just big enough for the four of you and go home, you should be fine. She won’t know we’ve been on holiday. She probably thinks we’ve just gone shopping.’
‘What about my poor Igorina?’ said Winchflat.
‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten about her, sweetheart,’ said Mordonna. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but you did manufacture her out of readily available parts, didn’t you?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Winchflat. ‘But she was a living, breathing creature with a soul.’
‘Actually, sweetheart, she was a zombie and, as you know, the only soles zombies have are on the bottom of their feet.’
‘But, but … we were engaged,’ Winchflat said.
‘Really?’
‘Well, not exactly. I hadn’t got round to asking her, but I’m sure she would have said yes, once I had taught her to speak properly.’
‘Never mind, darling,’ said Mordonna trying to hide her relief that her son’s hideous creation was not going to become her daughter-in-law. ‘Parsnip, do you know what happened to my faithful pet vulture, Leach?’
‘Him toast become,’ said Parsnip. ‘Burnt to a crips.’
‘A crisp?’
‘Yes,’ said Parsnip. ‘Vulture flavoured crips, him delicious, yum, yum, thank you, better than salt-n-vinegar, better than igorinaflavour.’
‘You ate them?’ said Mordonna.
‘Waste not want not,’ said Parsnip. ‘Long flying here needed something for journey.’
‘Fair enough.’
Winchflat went and sat by the window. Along the beach a team of scientists were still poking and prodding at the turrets of the girls’ sandcastle with a whole barrage of high-tech equipment.
Winchflat concentrated hard. The ground around the sandcastle began to shake. The scientists dropped their equipment and ran. As they did so the entire castle rose slowly into the air. When it was a hundred metres above the beach, there was a blinding flash and fourteen thousand very dead slimy jellyfish came raining down on everyone.
‘I thought that would make me feel better,’ said Winchflat, ‘but it didn’t.’
‘Never mind, darling,’ said Mordonna. ‘Why don’t y
ou think of poor Igorina as a kind of prototype and when we get settled again you can build a new and much better one.’
‘Yeah, one without the pooey smell,’ said Morbid.
‘Yes,’ said Betty, ‘one where none of the bits keep falling off.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Winchflat, ‘but you know, no one’s ever quite the same as your first love.’
‘Actually, I don’t, darling,’ said Mordonna. ‘Your father was my first love, but he is also my last love.’
‘Aww,’ said Betty.
‘Yeughh,’ said Merlinmary. ‘Sloppy, sloppy.’
‘But what are you all going to do?’ said Mrs Hulbert.
‘We will have to go far, far away,’ said Mordonna.
‘But, but…’ Mrs Hulbert began, her bottom lip quivering and tears coming into her eyes. ‘You’re my best friend, Mordonna. Does this mean I’ll never see you again?’
‘Of course not,’ Mordonna lied. ‘Once we get somewhere safe, we’ll let you know and you can come and visit us.’
She knew that this would be impossible. The Hearse Whisperer was not stupid. She would probably suspect that the Floods would have made friends in the neighbourhood. So she would be watching everyone in the street. She would hide microscopic tracking devices under the skin behind the left knee of every man, woman and child in Acacia Avenue while they were asleep. She would even tag the dogs and cats. She would know where every single one of them was all the time. Mordonna knew that no matter how safe and secure their eventual hiding place would be, they would never be able to see the Hulberts again.
Betty knew this too and wrapped Ffiona up in her arms and hugged her tight until Ffiona realised it as well. The two of them went to Ffiona’s room and, while she packed her bag, Betty tried to reassure her.
‘Look, we’re witches and wizards,’ she said. ‘We are the cleverest people in the world, and there are nine of us – nine-and-a-half if you count Granny – and there is only one Hearse Whisperer. I know she’s evil and cunning, but we caught her once before, so I’m sure we can do it again. And then you can come and see us, or we could even come back and build a new house in Acacia Avenue.’
Floods 6 Page 8