‘Let’s try and find a hippy encampment,’ said Mordonna. ‘Somewhere we can try and blend in.’
Blending in anywhere for the Floods was about as likely as a stick of dynamite blending in with a bonfire.
They drove inland until they reached soft green rolling hills and little valleys of quaint villages full of rich city slickers who were ‘reassessing and changing their lives in a deep and meaningful way by leaving the hustle and bustle of the city for a tranquil life in the country’, which meant what they were actually doing was taking all the city stuff with them, but with more flowers.
‘This is pretty,’ said Mordonna.
‘I know – horrible, isn’t it?’ said Betty.
‘Don’t think we’ll find many hippies around here,’ said Winchflat. ‘In fact, I think if we stopped they’d chase us out of town.’
‘So how do we actually find some hippies?’ said Valla.
‘Well, I thought if we could find one of these commune things where they all live together in a muddy field full of old buses and vans, we could hide out there for a while until we work out exactly what to do,’ said Winchflat.
‘Yes, but how do we find a commune?’
‘Maybe it would be easier to avoid all the places where we would never find one,’ said Valla. ‘Like here in golf club paradise. I mean, even the grass is standing neatly to attention here.’
‘Good idea, sweetheart,’ said Mordonna. She turned to her husband, who had managed to drive for over three kilometres without hitting anything or leaving the road. ‘Are we not blessed to have such wonderfully clever and talented children, my darling?’
‘Indeed we are,’ said Nerlin, who knew which side of the family their kids had got their brains from. ‘Do you think it’s catching? Because I could do with a bit more clever.’
They drove down more winding country lanes that gradually stopped winding, and through more soft green valleys that gradually stopped being soft and green, and began climbing until they came out onto a wide flat moorland where the trees were no more than scrubby bushes and the earth huddled in small piles between big grey rocks. There were no houses here, no fences, no telephone wires, almost no sign that humans had ever set foot there, apart from a few scruffy sheep that were attempting to eat the last scrappy bits of green in this desolate place.
‘This is more like it,’ said Valla. ‘No one would live up here if they could afford not to.’
‘Though, of course, humans must have been here at some point,’ said Betty. ‘Otherwise there wouldn’t even be a road.’
‘Yes,’ said Mordonna. ‘And a road has a beginning and an end so it must go somewhere.’
‘If you ask me,’ said Valla, looking out at the endless expanse of desolation, ‘it looks like the road to nowhere.’
Which was a Very Wise thing to say, because they drove between some huge boulders, turned a corner and there, pointing down a dirt track off into the distance, was a sign.
It said:
‘Now, that’s my kind of place,’ said Valla and they turned off down the track.
The track to Nowhere led up into a range of bleak mountains. Its surface was covered in rock and potholes and deep puddles, yet there were tyre tracks in the mud that looked to be fairly recent. The small clumps of scrubby grass that had clung to the side of the road gradually vanished until everything, as far as the eye could see, was grey and lifeless.
‘This is my kind of countryside,’ said Valla. ‘No nasty flowers and pretty stuff, just a grey lifeless expanse.’
‘Just like you, my darling,’ said Mildred.
‘You too, cuddlecorpse,’ said Valla.
‘Yeuuch,’ said Betty.
Then the signs began.
At first they were faint, like chalk that had been rained on. The first one, on a rock half-sunk into the ground, said:
It was followed almost immediately by another that said:
‘Do you think we should go back?’ said Betty.
‘No. They look ancient,’ said Winchflat. ‘Probably been there for years.’
The next sign did not look ancient. It was on a white metal post and in neat black paint it said:
‘I had a great-aunt called Anthrax,’ said Mordonna.
‘They’ve spelt dangerous wrong,’ said Betty.
said the next sign.
said the next, followed by:
‘Brilliant, said Nerlin. ‘Just what we’re looking for – hippies.’
‘Could be all fake,’ said Winchflat. ‘Could be a top secret military germ warfare research establishment pretending to be hippies.’
‘Germ warfare?’ said the twins. ‘Brilliant.’
They reached the highest part of the track and the ground levelled out between giant boulders. Low clouds swirled around the mountain tops above them and the air grew sharp and cold. Behind them, the grey deserted plain looked grey and deserted, which it was apart from the sheep, who didn’t count because sheep are more like walking vegetables than proper thinking creatures.
There was one last sign.
‘I would say,’ said Nerlin, pulling over, ‘that whoever lives up here does not want visitors.’
‘You think?’ said Betty.
‘Well, nothing we’ve seen so far is any risk to us,’ said Mordonna. ‘Don’t forget we’re witches and wizards. Bombs and diseases have no effect on us.’
‘Maybe one of us should go ahead on foot to scout out the situation,’ said Nerlin.
‘OK, if you like,’ said Mordonna. ‘Off you go, Parsnip.’
‘Sky falling down. Snip-Snip cold,’ said the old bird as the clouds came down around them. ‘Need hot soup.’
‘You go and see what’s ahead. There’s a good boy,’ said Mordonna. ‘And when you get back I’ll give you a big mug of mulligatawny soup, with real tawny in it, your favourite.’
‘No prob, like, er, man. Snip-Snip go see wassup,’ said the bird, who had also got into the hippy thing.
He jumped down off the right-wing mirror and started walking up the track.
‘What are you doing, you stupid bird?’ Nerlin shouted after him.
‘Snip-Snip go ahead on foot, like you said, man.’
‘OK, OK. Well, there’s been a change of plan,’ said Nerlin. ‘Go ahead on wing.’
‘Right off, dude man,’ said Parsnip and flew into the cloud.
Meanwhile, the Hulberts had arrived back at Acacia Avenue to find that the worst had indeed happened. The Floods’ houses at numbers 11 and 13 had not simply been burnt to the ground, they had been blasted into total oblivion. There were no bits of brick wall or smouldering armchairs. There was just a very deep, black, still smoking hole. The whole site was cordoned off with that black and yellow keep-out tape and a team of policemen and forensic scientists were digging up the garden.
The trouble was that the blast had disturbed some of the Floods’ relatives who had been buried there. Great-Aunt Blodwen’s knees had gone flying through the bedroom window of a house across the street and Uncle Flatulence’s rib cage had trapped a small child who happened to be walking by at the time. Cousin Vein, who had only been half dead when he had been buried, was now wholly dead and mixed up in the branches of a big tree, from where he was dripping onto an ambulance.
So now the police were treating the whole thing as a murder investigation.
‘Well, I always said they were a strange family,’ said the man who had woken up to find bits of Great-Aunt Blodwen in bed beside him. He was standing in the middle of the street with the rest of the neighbours, trying to see past the keep-out tape.
‘So did I,’ said his wife.
‘But who would have thought they were mass murderers?’ said the man.
‘They killed my cat,’ said the man’s daughter.
‘No they didn’t,’ said his wife. ‘It was run over by a car. The Floods just ate it.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Mrs Hulbert. The Hulberts had arrived in their small rental car just as the road was blo
cked off by the police, so they were standing with the rest of the neighbours.
A creepy woman with a hat pulled down over her face and a very large pair of dark glasses came over to the Hulberts. She was holding a pencil and a notebook. It was the Hearse Whisperer.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I am from the Morning Herald. Can I ask you a few questions?’
‘Oh, er, um, we were away on holiday when this happened so we don’t know anything,’ said Mr Hulbert.
‘Really, where?’
Fortunately, Winchflat, being a genius, had suspected the Hearse Whisperer might hang around looking for clues, so he had made each of the Hulberts a miniature Hearse-Whisperer-Warning-Device and implanted them under their armpits. If the Hearse Whisperer approached them the warning devices would start to tingle.
They were tingling like mad.
‘Monte Carlo,’ said Mr Hulbert at exactly the same time as Mrs Hulbert said, ‘Las Vegas,’ and Ffiona said, ‘Paris.’
‘We’ve been on a tour,’ said Mr Hulbert.
‘Blooga, blooga, amphibious,’ said the baby Hulbert, Claude.
The Hearse Whisperer could tell they were lying, but she also knew that Mordonna must have inoculated each of them so that no matter what she did, they would never be able to tell her the truth even if they wanted to.
‘So you didn’t know the people who lived in the bombed houses then,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Mr and Mrs Hulbert.
‘How do you know it was a bomb?’ said Ffiona. ‘It could have been a gas leak.’
‘Or a lightning strike,’ said Mr Hulbert.
‘Or someone left the gas on,’ said Mrs Hulbert. ‘And no, we did not know the Frauds.’
‘The Frauds?’ said the Hearse Whisperer.
‘Wasn’t that their name?’ said Mrs Hulbert.
‘Blooga, blooga, lighthouse,’ said Claude.
‘Well, little girl,’ said the Hearse Whisperer, turning to Ffiona to try one last time to get the information she needed, ‘did you have a lovely time at, um, where was it you said you’d been?’
‘Scotland.’
‘Excuse me,’ said the Hearse Whisperer. She walked over to a large tree and banged her head against it.
Because it was the evil Hearse Whisperer doing this and not an ordinary person, the tree came off the worst. All its leaves shrivelled up and died and several of its larger branches came crashing down, squashing a cat that was just about to leap on a small bird, and totally wrecking a police car.
Which just goes to show, the Hearse Whisperer thought as she left, that every cloud has a silver lining. Or in this case, two silver linings.
‘Snip-Snip bring love and peas, man,’ said Parsnip when he arrived back at the Floods campervan an hour later.
‘So it’s hippies,’ said Nerlin, ‘and not a top secret military base.’
‘Chill out, wizardman,’ said Parsnip. ‘Isallcool.’
They drove along the track, stopping to clear the rocks that had obviously been put there deliberately. Some of the rocks were so big it must have taken at least a dozen people to push them into place. Of course, for wizards, moving them wasn’t a problem. Each of them took it in turns transforming a rock into the vegetable of their choice. Everyone agreed that Betty’s two-metre-tall cabbage was the best because when they drove the van into it, it rolled off down the road like a huge rolling cabbage.
The final obstacle on the road to Nowhere was a three-metre-wide ditch that had been dug across the road, but all it took to fill it in was a very small earthquake.
After that everything changed. They drove round a corner and the road began to go downhill. The clouds cleared and grass began to appear, then bushes then trees, then birds and softer, greener grass and softer, greener bushes and prettier birds until they found themselves in the most beautiful valley they had ever seen. It was the floor of a long-dead volcano, hidden away from the outside world like an enchanted place out of a fairy story.
Except for the scruffy old hippy who was standing right in front of their van.
He was smiling and holding out his open hands in a love and peace sort of way, which usually means, ‘Give me a piece of everything you’ve got and I will love you.’
‘Welcome to Nowhere, man,’ he said. ‘I am Nameless.’
‘Nameless?’ said Mordonna.
‘Yeah, man. I am Nameless because names are like possessions, they cage you. So when we all came here, we left our names out there.’
‘How many of you are there?’ said Nerlin.
‘Thirty-seven, though we are one, man,’ said Nameless.
‘Including the women?’ said Mordonna.
‘What?’
‘And you’re all called Nameless?’
‘Yeah, man.’
‘So how do you know who is who?’ said Mordonna.
‘Yeah, well, man, no one said it was easy being, like, alternative,’ said Nameless.
‘So absolutely everyone here is called Nameless?’
‘Oh, no, man,’ said Nameless. ‘The Cool One is not called Nameless. He’s called Sanguine. He’s like, our guru.’
‘What about your animals?’ asked Betty. ‘Are they called Nameless too?’
‘No, man. The dogs are all called Dog and the cats are all called Cat, though the Cool One is thinking of changing their names because he says it’s, like, stereotyping.’
‘So I suppose the chickens are all called Chicken?’ said Betty.
‘No.’
‘What are they called then?’
‘Ethel.’
‘What, all of them?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK,’ said Mordonna. ‘Moving on. Can we, like, chill here for a while?’
By now there were about fifteen Namelesses all gathered round. They nodded and did a bit of chanting and then said, ‘Sure, man.’
‘And remember,’ said one of the Namelesses, who may or may not have been the same one they had been talking to earlier, ‘there is, like, only one rule here and that is that there are no rules.’
‘So where can we park?’ said Winchflat.
‘Oh, like, anywhere, man,’ said Nameless. ‘Well, I say anywhere and that’s cool, but don’t park over there by the orange yurt because that’s, like, where the Cool One lives and he needs his space. And, like, down there is the Stamping Ground and that needs a lot of space for everyone to stamp. Same for the Sacred Chanting Place over there. And not under that tree, man, because there’s a magpie’s nest there and she’s got, like, eggs and stuff so she needs her space. And not up there because that’s, like, the Vegie Garden and, like, vegetables need their space too, man.’
‘So how about over there by the fence?’
‘Yeah, that’s kind of cool, though of course the fence needs its space, man.’
‘OK, where then?’
‘Well, like, right where you are is cool.’
‘If you are all so free,’ said Betty, ‘why do you have a fence? It’s not as if there’s any way to get in or out of the valley except by the track we came on and the fence doesn’t actually fence anything.’
‘Well, you might see it as a fence,’ Nameless began.
‘Because it is,’ said Betty.
‘No, but to us, it’s, like, a symbol of the outside world where everyone is fenced in by authority and rules and stuff,’ another Nameless finished.
‘Yeah, no rules, no rules,’ the others chanted over and over again until one of them pointed out it was five past six and they were all late for the Six O’Clock Chant.
‘Like, the Cool One gets totally freaked if anyone is late for the Six O’Clock Chant,’ said Nameless.
‘But I thought you said there were no rules?’ said Betty.
‘No, there aren’t, man,’ said a Nameless.
‘Except the Six O’Clock Chant rule,’ said another.
‘And the Eight O’Clock Chant rule,’ said another.
‘And the Midnight Chant rule,’ said another.
&n
bsp; ‘Yeah, man, and of course the Dawn Chant rule,’ said another. ‘Which is actually around ten o’clock in the morning because the Cool One says doing anything before then is, like, totally playing into the brainwashed work ethic thing.’
‘And the three daily Stamping Rules.’
‘And the Earwax Rule.’
‘Don’t ask,’ said Mordonna, putting her hand over Betty’s mouth.
‘So you’re saying,’ said Winchflat, ‘that there are no rules unless the Cool One makes one up.’
‘Well, no, man, because the Cool One doesn’t make up rules. He just leads us along the path to Nirvana with his, like, extreme wisdom and guiding hand.’
‘I bet he never does the washing up, does he?’ said Mordonna.
‘Well, no, of course not, man. That is a great honour awarded to all the chicks.’
‘What’s washing up, man?’ said another Nameless as they ran off to chant.
Nerlin drove the van well away from the rest of the old vans, buses, yurts, assorted containers, sheds and tents and parked under the shade of a huge old tree.
‘I expect it’s not good to park here. All those dead leaves in the grass probably need their space,’ said Valla and they all fell about laughing.
‘Are we actually going to stay here?’ said Betty. ‘They’re a bunch of complete idiots.’
‘I know that, sweetheart,’ said Mordonna. ‘But this is probably the best place to hide while we work out what to do. The Hearse Whisperer would never suspect for a second that we’d be in a place like this.’
A dreadful wailing noise drifted down the valley as the Six O’Clock Chant reached its peak. It sounded as if every single one of the thirty-seven hippies was chanting in a different key. The cats and dogs ran for shelter. The chickens, although they had heard the chants dozens of times, all did their best to fly up into the safety of the nearest tree.7
‘No wonder the cats are running away,’ said Winchflat. ‘That noise sounds like ten cats being strangled.’
‘I wonder if they’ve got a manager,’ said Satanella. ‘I reckon every witches’ coven in the galaxy would buy a CD of that, if only to keep evil spirits from running away.’
Floods 7 Page 2