Floods 7

by Colin Thompson

  ‘Ready?’ he said.

  ‘Umm, er, not really,’ said the Queen. ‘Maybe we should talk about this a bit more.’

  ‘No time,’ said Winchflat. ‘Bits of you are falling off as you stand there.’

  ‘Here, take this,’ he added, picking up her right ear.

  ‘GR!!***&8¢¢KK*!’ Vessel screeched as the Queen hesitated at the water’s edge.

  ‘Oh get on with it,’ snapped Mordonna and gave her mother an almighty shove.

  Big splash.

  Waves.

  Queen and cage vanishing below the water’s surface.

  Water calming down until it was as smooth as a sheet of glass.

  Then nothing.

  ‘Oops,’ said Mordonna.

  More nothing and, several minutes later, even more nothing.

  Then a single bubble.

  Then a lot more bubbles accompanied by everyone holding their noses and waving their hands in front of their faces.

  ‘It’s supposed to do that,’ Winchflat lied. ‘I think it’s all the bad stuff coming out.’

  Actually, he was completely right, except the bad stuff was really bad, and boy was there a lot of it.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ said Nerlin, trying not to breathe in as he spoke, ‘no one light a match.’

  Everyone except Mordonna backed away from the pool, ran out of the door, up the stairs and out into the fresh air. Mordonna alone stood vigil as the foul bubbles poured out their grey fumes, but eventually they began to lessen. The grey fumes clung to the sludge-covered wall of the cellar, turning to slime. As they did so, the air cleared until it was safe to breathe again. The last bubble burst and the pool grew flat and still again.

  As Mordonna watched and waited, Betty came back and took hold of her hand.

  ‘Is Granny dead?’

  ‘I’m not sure, darling,’ said Mordonna. ‘I don’t think so. I can feel her presence, but then I can feel the presence of my great-grandmother Florea, and she is most definitely dead.’

  The tops of two heads broke the surface of the water. Then two foreheads, four ears and four eyes appeared. More bits of body appeared until Queen Scratchrot and Vessel walked out of the pool and stood before mother and daughter.

  ‘Has it worked?’ said the Queen.

  Mordonna and Betty were speechless. Not only had the Terrible Pool of Vestor freed Vessel from his cage, it had totally transformed him and the Queen. No longer were they two ancient wrinkled wrecks. The pool had turned back time to the exact day the two of them had left Transylvania Waters twenty-three years before. They were still quite old, but not so old that bits of them were falling off, and now their wrinkles were not so deep that you could hide things in them.

  ‘You look great,’ said Mordonna. ‘If I didn’t have such perfect skin already, I’d be tempted to take a dip myself.’

  But, with the future in mind, she filled a couple of bottles from the pool, and then the four of them went outside to join the others.

  ‘I think we should destroy Forsaken Hall,’ said Mildred Flambard-Flood as they got ready to leave. ‘We should not just knock it down, but turn it into dust so it can never be used again to bring terror to innocent witches and wizards.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Mordonna. ‘We should remove it and, with it, all traces of the Knights Intolerant from the face of the Earth. After all, if someone like the Hearse Whisperer came here, who is to say what she could and would recreate with her evil heart.’

  So the family stood side by side and faced the old building and, as they concentrated, it collapsed in on itself. The chimneys fell through the roof. The roof fell through the attic. The attic fell through the upstairs, the upstairs fell through the downstairs and finally the downstairs fell into the cellars.

  ‘Um, what about the Terrible Pool of…?’ Betty began to say, but it was too late.

  The ground shook and heaved and spat and shook again and slowly a totally black tower began to rise from the ground. The walls sucked in all the light around them. Apart from one row of narrow slits just below the overhanging roof, there were no doors or windows in the entire building.

  ‘Oops,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘We are all going to climb very quietly into the van and drive slowly away,’ said Mordonna. ‘And then when we get to the next town we are going to go to the planning department of the local council and report an illegally constructed building out on the moors. Then it becomes their problem.’

  ‘Do you really think some small town council officials will be able to tell the Knights Intolerant what to do?’ said Valla. ‘They’d get obliterated.’

  ‘Well, there you go,’ said Mordonna. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’

  What with Mordonna and Nerlin and the seven children and Mildred Flambard-Flood and the Queen and Vessel and Brastof, there was not enough room for everyone inside the old campervan. So as soon as they were out of sight of the tower, Winchflat asked Nerlin to pull over so he could make a few modifications.

  He stretched the van a bit, gave it an upstairs level and another four wheels and, while he was at it, improved everything else. No longer would it be confined to roads and tracks. It was now a true All-Terrain Vehicle – not one of those girlie four-wheel drives that are driven through the dangerous jungles of suburbia where they have to contend with massive obstacles like hamburger containers and puddles, but a true ALL-Terrain Vehicle. Think of any terrain in any dimension and the campervan could traverse it.

  ‘Even the sea?’ said Merlinmary.

  ‘Yes, no problem,’ said Winchflat, pushing a button.

  A big rubber skirt inflated around them as the van turned into a hovercraft.

  ‘Bet it can’t fly,’ said Morbid.

  ‘Bet it can,’ said Winchflat as the doors flew open and began to flap like the wings of a bird.

  ‘Bet it can’t …’ Satanella began.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Winchflat. ‘It can ice-skate, pop a wheelie, break the sound barrier, fly into space and travel in time.’

  ‘Does it have a toilet?’ said Betty, as they skimmed over the Mediterranean Sea towards Southern Europe. ‘Because I need to go.’

  ‘Umm … Hold on a minute.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ said Betty. ‘I can’t.’

  As soon as they hit land, the van screeched to a halt and Betty ran behind a bush. When she got back Winchflat had added a toilet, a shower, wi-fi internet, a rooftop barbecue and a nodding plastic dog on the dashboard.

  ‘Next time you stop,’ said Betty, ‘could you find a bush out in the country? The owner of the flower shop was really cross.’

  ‘So are we going to Transylvania Waters now or not?’ said Betty.

  ‘Well, yes, if you’re all sure,’ said Winchflat.

  After all his modifications to the VW, he was the only one who knew how to drive it. Nerlin got in a big sulk about this and sat in the back of the van with his back to everybody making engine noises.

  ‘Yes, it’s what we all agreed, remember?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘I didn’t agree,’ said Nerlin grumpily. ‘I think it’s a silly idea.’

  Mordonna pointed out that Nerlin had his doubts about everything, even going to the toilet.

  ‘No I don’t,’ Nerlin objected.

  ‘You so do, Dad,’ said Betty. ‘It’s always, “Do I need to go or not or should I wait until after lunch?”.’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone do that?’

  ‘No. Normal people say, “I need to go to the bathroom” and they just go,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Really?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘Really.’

  ‘But that takes all the anticipation out of it, all the excitement,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘You get excited about going to the toilet?’ said Valla.

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

  On Tristan da Cunha, the Hearse Whisperer had just regained consciousness. The last thing Dr Reversion
had done to her before sending her back there was to poke an Ultrasonic Vacuum Cleaner into her ears and suck out all her recent memories. Of course, even the best vacuums can never get into those tight, hard-to-reach corners where the nastiest bits always hide. Although the doctor had removed all memories of the Hearse Whisperer’s visit to the Sulfuric Clinic, she knew she had been somewhere. This made her depressed, which was why she had been to the clinic in the first place. But she comforted herself by thinking that maybe the place she had been to had been a flower shop.

  ‘A flower shop?’ she said. ‘Don’t I hate flowers? All that pretty colour and perfume? Isn’t that the opposite of everything I stand for?’

  But the Flower Shop Spirit was stuck right in the front of her brain so every time she closed her eyes and tried to visualise something evil like a jagged, rusty, yet really sharp knife, all she could see were yellow chrysanthemums. She concentrated and tried to recall the smell of someone who she had just chopped into little bits, but all she could smell was yellow chrysanthemums.

  I feel as if I am only one short step away from sitting in a chair smelling of wee and having conversations with the wall like my old grandmother did, she thought.

  ‘I need help,’ she said, but there was no one there to answer her. This was good because she knew that if anyone had heard her say that she would have had to kill them.

  Except, she thought, I wouldn’t so much kill them as give them a nice vase of yellow chrysanthemums.

  ‘I need to go and get help,’ she said, but all the information in her head about the Sulfuric Clinic had been vacuumed out and her instinct told her she would get the help she needed in a flower shop.

  Then she dug back deep into older memories that the doctor hadn’t been able to remove. There was a vague thought that had been nagging the back of her brain. It had been a sudden brilliant thought on the verge of exploding into her consciousness when…

  What?

  There had been a penguin and it had asked her what she was doing, buried up to her neck in snow in the remotest place on Earth, and she had said she was waiting for someone and the penguin had said something…

  What was it?

  ‘Do you not think that maybe – and this is just an idea – do you not think that this is probably the very last place you would ever meet them?’

  YES! That was it!

  And then a really, really large penny had dropped, and she had been distracted, but now she was focused.

  And she put two and two together with the really, really large penny and the thought jumped up and hit her so hard it gave her a headache.

  And the thought was this:

  Maybe Tristan da Cunha was not the last place on Earth you would ever meet someone you were looking for. If the someone was the Flood family, maybe the whole remote island thing was a red herring and I hate fish. Maybe there was actually somewhere that was even less likely. Somewhere that was the very, very last place anyone would expect the Floods to go.

  Transylvania Waters.

  The idea was so unlikely that it was obvious. Or was it all a super, triple, quintuple, double, double bluff, and those bumps in the snow, halfway down the path to Potato Patches, were not just snowdrifts but the Floods. Or not.

  The Hearse Whisperer stared at the bumps and concentrated. The snow melted and nine sheep stood there in a confused group with clouds of steam coming off their wool.

  ‘That’s it,’ said the Hearse Whisperer. ‘Time to go home.’

  Because sick, evil, double-agent spies get homesick from time to time, so even if the Floods weren’t going to Transylvania Waters, it wouldn’t be an entirely wasted journey.

  Except she thought that she was probably, almost, nearly up to using up her last transformation.

  ‘But when the wretched Floods do come back to Transylvania Waters, I will be waiting,’ she laughed, ‘and I will teach them a lesson they will never forget. I will teach them flower arranging.’

  ‘No, no, what?’ she said. ‘It’s supposed to be painful and make them dead, those were my orders.’

  But the spirits that Dr Reversion had implanted had taken control and as much as she tried, the Hearse Whisperer could not get flower arranging out of her mind.

  ‘There will be gladioli and tulips, and … no, no, no,’ she cried. ‘I need pain and suffering, not floral decorations. I need help. I need to go to …um. I need to go to, er, Flowers ‘R’ Us?’

  She screamed and banged her head against the side of the volcano and realised that somehow, somewhere, she had forgotten everything she had ever been taught about potty training and her undies were full of very, very cold wet yellow patches that were turning to ice.

  ‘Right,’ she snapped as she changed into an eagle. ‘I am going to Transylvania Waters and I am going to make the Floods arrange flowers until their fingers bleed and there will be poisonous flowers and flowers with sharp thorns. Well, I say poisonous and sharp thorns, but of course the two will have to complement each other so I might have to choose between poisonous or prickly, but there will definitely be one of them. And I’m going to change my undies.’

  She threw herself off the edge of the volcano. ‘And ferns!’ she shouted. ‘And mushrooms!’

  But as she hadn’t actually finished changing into an eagle, she landed on her head on a pointy rock.31 This was because when a witch gets to the last couple of transformations, they can take quite a long time to happen. This time there was a period of at least ten minutes when the Hearse Whisperer had her real body from the knees upwards and an eagle’s feet from her knees down.

  While she recovered, she pondered the idea of using mushrooms in flower arranging. It appealed to her. It could possibly be a world first. There were some very pretty toadstools and some of them were wonderfully poisonous.

  It took the Hearse Whisperer a long time to get back to Transylvania Waters. Not just because she was old and tired, but every time she flew over land, she was distracted by flowers. No matter how high she flew she could see them, because she was an eagle and they have eyesight like, well, eagles. And of course, seeing flowers wasn’t enough. She had to fly down and smell them, which meant she got a lot of stones thrown at her because humans do not feel comfortable about gigantic eagles landing in their gardens and trying to talk to them about their roses.

  When she reached Transylvania Waters, she soared high above its ring of dangerous clouds,32 took a deep breath and drifted down into the city. She landed on the lead roof of one of Castle Twilight’s taller, more deserted towers and fell fast asleep.

  The Floods drove north-east into the dark bit of Europe, where all the trees are black and people like cuckoo clocks so much they actually buy them. At each border crossing Mordonna clicked her fingers and the officials ushered them through into the next country.

  Finally the campervan stopped at the foot of a great mountain range.

  ‘You know what’s on the other side, don’t you?’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Really flat stuff with no mountains at all?’ said Satanella.

  ‘More mountains, probably,’ said Nerlin. ‘See, you should have let me do the driving.’

  ‘Transylvania Waters,’ said Mordonna. ‘I can feel it calling me.’

  ‘Oh, is that what it is?’ said Nerlin. ‘I thought it was all the wretched beetroot soup we’ve been eating.’

  ‘If I remember my geography lessons,’ said the Queen, ‘there is no road as such into the country, just donkey tracks.’

  ‘Mother, it was a very long time ago when you were at school,’ said Mordonna. ‘Things have changed.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, your husband, my father, got rid of all the donkey tracks years ago.’

  ‘You mean there’s proper roads now?’

  ‘Did I say that?’ said Mordonna. ‘No, he just got rid of the donkey tracks.’

  ‘It’s not a problem,’ said Winchflat. ‘I told you the campervan could go anywhere and so it can.’

  He pressed two button
s and a big red knob and they slowly lifted into the air. A small dog who was in the middle of lifting his leg on one of the van wheels fainted in surprise. So did the old lady holding the dog’s lead.

  The van rose silently above the trees and vanished into the clouds that always covered the mountain tops.

  The clouds came halfway down the mountain, but only on the outside of Transylvania Waters. It had been like that for as long as anyone could remember. There were people over ninety years old who had never seen the mountain tops.

  The clouds had been put there by the first wizards to settle in Transylvania Waters, to keep outsiders from coming into their country. For the clouds were not simple collections of fluffy water vapour like they are everywhere else. These clouds contained sleeping gas so that anyone climbing up into them fell asleep long before they reached the summit. It didn’t take long for humans to learn to stay away. Sheep never learned, though, and the misty hillsides are dotted with sleeping sheep, some of whom have been there for centuries.

  ‘Wind up all the windows,’ said Winchflat as they rose higher towards the mountain tops. ‘I knew those fog lights would come in handy.’

  ‘Look at all those sheep,’ said Satanella to Brastof. ‘I’d love to get out and chase them.’

  ‘Getting out would not be good,’ warned Winchflat. ‘You would fall as fast asleep as they are.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t we open the window a bit and bark at them?’ said Satanella.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Brastof. ‘Brilliant. I aren’t barfed at a sheep for two hundred years.’

  ‘Don’t you mean barked?’ said Betty.

  ‘That too,’ said Brastof.

  ‘Do not open the window or we will all fall asleep,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Listen, darling,’ said Mordonna to Satanella, ‘when we get settled again, I’ll get you a sheep of your own and you can bark at it all day.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Satanella.

  ‘Can we barf at it too?’ said Brastof.

  ‘If you hose it down afterwards,’ said Mordonna.

  They came over the last rise and out of the clouds. It wasn’t gradual like normal clouds, but a sudden flat wall of fog. For a few seconds the front of the van was out in the cold clear air while the back was still hidden in mist. Then they were completely free and there it lay stretched out before them.