The deep sunless grey valley that was home.
Transylvania Waters.
Mordonna and Nerlin felt their blood surge with joy. Queen Scratchrot, although looking younger, had no blood left, but she felt her empty veins tingle.
Twenty-three years had passed since they had left the land of their birth. And every single day of those twenty-three years, Mordonna had closed her eyes for a few moments and brought back the memories of its wet grey valleys and waterfalls of acid rain.
She could see, far off in the distance, the brown fog of the evening rise out of Lake Tarnish and crawl towards the city, eating into everything as it passed, as it had done since the dawn of time.33 The spires of the castle, green with verdigris, poked through the fog like the legs of a dead spider. It was the most beautiful sight the Floods had ever seen.
Even Mildred Flambard-Flood and the children, who had never seen their parents’ homeland, stood in silence as they felt its magic calling out to them, inviting them down into the only true place on Earth where wizards and witches could be completely free.
‘How could we have stayed away so long?’ said Nerlin, putting his arm round Mordonna’s shoulder.
‘How could we have ever left such a paradise?’ she replied, tears filling her eyes as she watched far below the little dots that she knew were the Evening Moths crashing into Lake Tarnish, overcome by its wonderful toxic fumes.
‘Because of your stinky stupid father,’ said the Queen.
‘Yes,’ said Mordonna. ‘Since he took over, Transylvania Waters has ceased to be paradise.’
‘True, and I blame myself for marrying him and bringing him here,’ said the Queen. ‘When my father was King, life was wonderful.’
‘Then we must make it wonderful again,’ said Nerlin, so moved by seeing his homeland that he forgot all about sulking.
Transylvania Waters is surrounded on every side by tall mountains.34 The slopes below the clouds on the outside, facing away from the country, are soft and green with grass and bushes and pretty birds sipping nectar from exquisite wild flowers and all that sort of fairy story rubbish, but those that face inwards are bare and rough and devoid of all life apart from the Night Vultures, a unique species that not only eat dead things, but will actually dig them up to do so.35
There is one other type of creature living on the Transylvania Waters side of the mountains. There is one on each mountain and they live in caves just below the summit. They are the Crones, old ladies with no living relatives who shun society and live their remaining years in deep meditation and complete isolation.36
When a Crone knows she is about to die, she lights a fire and down in the valley fights break out among the crowd of old ladies waiting to take the dead crone’s place. The winner is then given a pair of warm socks, a sealed box containing a small bonfire and a box of matches to signal when she is dying, and sent off up the mountain. Quite often, because of their arthritis and the steep, rough terrain, they don’t make it as far as the cave. After the Night Vultures have tidied them away, there is another old lady fight to choose her replacement. This can take weeks. In 1937 it took fifteen fights before an old lady actually made it up to the empty cave.
Winchflat brought the campervan down in front of one of the Crone Caves. By a wonderful coincidence, the sort of coincidence you usually only get in books, the Crone living there had once worked for Queen Scratchrot.
‘I smell the Queen,’ she said.
‘Is that you, Quenelle,’ said the Queen from the back of the van, ‘my faithful old Armpit Cleaner?’
‘It is, your majesty,’ said the old lady, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Oh, how I missed you when you left. The King took a new wife and she was so cruel to all your faithful servants.’
‘A new wife?’ said the Queen. ‘Who?’
‘She was not from our country,’ said Quenelle. ‘She was from Bavaria.’
‘Not the Countess Slab,’ said the Queen, rattling with laughter. ‘Don’t say it was her.’
‘Yes, your majesty,’ said the old lady, ‘and a bigger, wobblier, crueller, horribler, smellier person I never did meet.’
‘But seriously rich, though,’ said the Queen.
‘Indeed, my lady.’
‘I have heard, though, that she sings like a bird,’ said the Queen. ‘Is that true?’
‘Oh yes, your majesty. She sings like a bird and does so from dawn till sunset,’ said Quenelle. ‘But the bird is a chicken.’
‘I am sorry you and my other servants suffered so, but to be honest the two of them deserve each other.’
‘Indeed, your majesty. They have made each other’s lives complete misery,’ said Quenelle. ‘And may I say, your majesty, you are looking younger than ever.’
Then Quenelle asked politely and the rest of the family turned away while the Queen lifted her arms and once again her old servant licked her armpits clean, as she had first done when Queen Scratchrot had been a baby.
‘As sweet as ever,’ said Quenelle, which made everyone else feel like throwing up.37
Crones live on a diet of snow and gruel, so Mordonna closed her eyes and did the Dinner Spell Number 437 – the banquet special. Over dinner they discussed their next moves.
‘There are many who will welcome you back with open arms,’ said Quenelle. ‘I would imagine that, after years with Countess Slab, even the King would be happy to see you again. And if you think about it, there’s probably only one person who won’t be overjoyed to see you and that’s the Countess herself.’
‘Happy?’ said the Queen. ‘I’ll teach him happy. If it wasn’t for him we would never have had to leave all those years ago. Oh no, I want double, triple, quadruple revenge with extreme pain and humiliation. I want to see him tied naked to a cow with stinging nettles taped to his naughty bits and paraded through the streets of the town with barbed wire wrapped all round his bottom. I want him locked in the Transylvania Waters Big Brother House for six months with seventeen brain-dead teenagers who talk about nothing but the fluff in their tummy buttons. I want him covered in Vegemite and locked in a cage with fifty hungry poodles. I want so many horrible and nasty things done to him that I could write a big book about it.’38
‘But don’t they say “to err is human, to forgive divine”?’ said Nerlin.
‘First of all, I am not human. I am a witch,’ said the Queen. ‘And second, whoever said that was a complete idiot. They also, and this is probably a completely different “they”, say “revenge is sweet”.’
‘But, but, what about “forgive thine enemies” and all that,’ said Nerlin, who was quite a gentle soul underneath his gentle exterior.
‘Well, “revenge is a dish best served cold”, as they say, and he’s going to be very cold when I’m finished with him,’ said the Queen. ‘I was going to say the King won’t know what hit him, but where’s the fun in that? The King will most definitely know what hit him. ME!’
‘Wow, Granny,’ said Morbid. ‘You are so cool.’
‘Yes, I am, aren’t I,’ said the Queen. ‘And if you are good, I’ll let all you kids help me.’
‘Brilliant.’ Morbid and Silent gave each other a high-five.
‘We will form the King Quatorze Humiliation Society,’ said the Queen. ‘And turn his stupid new wife into a bouncy castle.’
‘Of course, there is another problem,’ said Mordonna. ‘And I certainly don’t want any of my family risking their lives to deal with it.’
‘What’s that then?’ said Nerlin.
‘The Hearse Whisperer.’
‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten about her,’ said Nerlin. ‘Winchflat, anything on your sensors?’
‘Well, she is either circling in the sky above us,’ said Winchflat, ‘or else there’s a moth stuck on my antenna.’
‘You’re sure she’s not still on Tristan da Cunha?’
‘No, according my printout, she actually came back to Transylvania Waters a little while ago, and then went back to Tristan da Cunha and then left, but
I’m not sure where she went next.’
‘Let’s just go with the moth idea, for the moment,’ said Mordonna. ‘We’ve enough to think about slipping back into the country. Besides, if Quenelle is right, we’ll have plenty of people prepared to hide us while we work out what to do.’
‘We could always go back and live in Acacia Avenue,’ said Betty, who was missing her best friend Ffiona.
‘I don’t know about everyone else,’ said Nerlin, ‘but I’ve had enough of living amongst humans. They’re just too weird and difficult.’
Everyone else felt the same, though they did agree with Betty that their human friends the Hulberts had been OK.
‘Mother, you are not going to kill the King, are you?’ said Mordonna. ‘It’s not that I like him or would mind him being annihilated or anything like that, but I will not have my children involved in killing things.’
‘Oh my goodness no,’ said the Queen. ‘He will end up living in a windowless stone hovel on a tiny remote Scottish island with three sheep, six clumps of grass and the Countess Slab, and they will both live miserably ever after for a very, very, long time with nothing to eat but seaweed and their own hair. No, it’s all the stuff that is going to happen to him between now and then that the children can help me with.’
‘And I’ll tell you something,’ she added. ‘It will sure beat the hell out of Playstation.’
The sun doesn’t so much as set over Transylvania Waters as get smothered by its brown smog. Then night falls with a soft thud. A few lamps twinkled in the darkness, going out one by one as the population went to bed. The silence was really quiet, broken only by the occasional loud pop as a Lake Tarnish fish exploded, having swum too close to the surface.
‘That is the most beautiful darkness I have ever seen,’ said Mildred. ‘The darkness inside my grave was lovely, but it was nothing compared to this.’
Since the verandah they had sat on at the end of every day in Acacia Avenue had been blasted into dust, the family were sitting together outside Quenelle’s cave on a carpet of dried twigs and toadstools. It was the first time in weeks that everyone felt completely relaxed as Transylvania Waters worked its magic on their weary bodies.
Mordonna stirred her warm blood slurpie with a dried nightingale. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘tomorrow we will go home.’
‘By the way,’ said Mildred, as Mordonna blew out the last candle. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’
FOOTNOTES
1 In Australia they put it in jars and sell it to other people to spread on their toast. I’m not allowed to say what it is in case we get sued, but it rhymes with ‘Make sure the lid is done up incredibly tight.’ This, of course, should say, ‘Make sure the lid is done up incredibly tightly’, but that wouldn’t rhyme with Vegemite.
2 If you are somewhere lush and green and it begins to rain and that incredible rich damp smell comes out of the earth and fills the air and you feel something stir deep in your soul, then somewhere in your family tree, maybe hundreds of years ago, you have a relative who came from Transylvania Waters.
3 Her left knee, right ankle and both thumbs.
4 Both elbows, several ribs and nose.
5 The Queen was, of course, referring to Vessel, her old servant and secret love, who the Hearse Whisperer had trapped inside an enchanted birdcage. You can read about this in The Floods 3: Home & Away.
6 See The Floods 4: Survivor to learn how Winchflat built himself a girlfriend and The Floods 6: The Great Outdoors to read how he lost her.
7 As everyone knows, the words ‘chicken’ and ‘flying’ don’t really belong in the same sentence. So every time the hippies chanted, all the chickens crashed into the trees, losing feathers, dropping eggs everywhere and getting sore heads.
8 Don’t try this at home. Actually, don’t try it anywhere – especially in the back of a fast-moving vehicle on a bumpy road like my Uncle Frank did. We never did get every last bit of his brains out of the upholstery.
9 The flies were the bright orange ones you only ever see on fresh cowpats, which coincidentally were exactly the same shade of orange as the Cool One’s yurt.
10 The Hearse Whisperer had just been on an Anger Management course, but that hadn’t really helped stop her hurting baby Claude since she had ended up eating the Anger Management consultant.
11 Of course, being a toddler, baby Claude frequently went to the toilet when he was asleep, but that weighed a lot more than 0.002 grams.
12 Her favourite nasty thing was to make all the feathers fall out of a passing pigeon so that it (a) crashed, and (b) caught a cold. Melting all the cheese on every pizza in the largest supermarket so it ran all over the floor, causing lots of old ladies to break their ankles and massive shopping trolley gridlocks, came a close second.
13 See The Floods 5: Prime Suspect .
14 As will be revealed a bit later, the spies who ended up trimming people’s infected toenails and verrucas for the rest of their lives were actually the lucky ones.
15 Thermal as in thermal air current, not a thermal vest, though at such altitudes it was extremely cold and some warm clothing would have been very welcome. Scientific tests have shown, however, that huge sea birds cannot fly very well if you dress them in thermal underwear.
16 This, of course, was not his original Hearse-Whisperer-Detector as that had been destroyed in the fire at Acacia Avenue. This was his Hearse-Whisperer-Detector Mark II, which was even more sensitive and could tell if the Hearse Whisperer had farted in an empty room up to 24 hours previously.
17 Which had actually been published, though only in Belgium and Wales (so far).
18 Which, of course, she ALWAYS is.
19 If you have ever been forced to eat gooseberries, you will realise that they taste awful even if the bushes haven’t been used as a toilet. They are disgusting. They look like nasty spiny sea creatures, but don’t taste as nice as nasty spiny sea creatures. I was also going to say that the two idiots had been using nettles instead of toilet paper, but the very thought of it made my eyes water so much that I couldn’t even type the right words.
20 Every evil spy is plagued with nightmares of doing their last transformation and losing their final bit of magic. It would mean that whatever form they were in when the very last transformation happened would be how they looked for the rest of their lives. As her magic faded, the Hearse Whisperer had these bad dreams almost every day and each one was worse than the one before. In the latest one she was a junior prune taster in the court of Henry VIII, not even the chief prune taster. The trick was to retire to the Street of a Thousand Chiropodists before you reached the very last transformation. The Hearse Whisperer did not want to end up like her great-grandmother, who was now a large black slug living on a cabbage in the kitchen garden of a deserted Belgian monastery. No, if she timed it right, she could spent the rest of her life working at the House of Corns. Though when she thought about it, maybe being a cabbage in a deserted monastery was not such a bad option.
21 Like Belgium was.
22 On a small island like Tristan da Cunha rats are unwelcome visitors, so once a year they have a Ratting Day when they try to catch as many as they can. There are prizes, including one for the longest rat tail!
23 The second one is at Quicklime College in Patagonia. The third one is top secret and actually never stays in the same place for more than a few minutes. Winchflat Flood, of course, has built a Time-Warp-Gate-Detector so he is the only person who always knows where it is. See The Floods 8: Better Homes and Gardens – which, strangely, I haven’t even written yet!
24 This is absolutely true. Look at it here: http://www.tristandc.com/peak.php
25 I know, as you should by now, that every single part of Transylvania Waters is remote, but this valley is the most remote bit of the whole country. Very few people who actually live in Transylvania Waters have heard of it and even one really stupid goatherd who lives in the actual valley hasn’t heard of it.
26 Yes, I know half of thirty-seven is e
ighteen and a half, but if you ever meet the strange half person, you’ll understand.
27 Oops, seem to have got muddled up with my shopping list.
28 And painful agony was one of the Hearse Whisperer’s favourite things, something she had enjoyed many, many times and considered herself to be something of a connoisseur of.
29 For the exact recipe of the blood that Dr Reversion poured into the Hearse Whisperer’s veins, see the back of this book.
30 The Queen’s teeth had been gritted since she had been dropped on the beach while on holiday recently with her family. See The Floods 6: The Great Outdoors .
31 The Hearse Whisperer had been right in thinking that she had almost no transformations left. Dr Reversion had known this and that was the reason she had sent her back to Tristan da Cunha in her real form. She would have to change to leave there and that would weaken her even more.
32 See next chapter.
33 Actually it hadn’t, because there hadn’t been a city there at the dawn of time and the fog had only been acid brown since the Industrial Revolution. Before that, it had been a happy fog full of songbirds and butterflies.
34 Of course it’s on all sides – otherwise it wouldn’t be surrounded.
35 This is why Transylvania Waters long ago gave up with cemeteries. You’d bury your dead granny and by the next day the Night Vultures had dug her up and eaten her. Most homes now have a huge dinner plate on the roof, which saves both the inhabitants and the vultures a lot of digging. The birds are known locally as the Funeral Directors.
36 Apart from the first Thursday of each month when they get together and play bingo.
37 Including me and everyone at my publisher.
38 A few years later the Queen did write the book Dead Kings Don’t Wear Crowns and it was the bestselling title in the whole of Transylvania Waters’ publishing history, outselling the other three books published there by ten to one.
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