Pure Dead Batty

by Debi Gliori

  Trying to drag his mind away from such horrors, Luciano turned to thoughts of his real family; the family he’d made, as opposed to the one he’d inherited. He corrected himself. The family he and Baci had made. He missed her so much. Right now he needed her more than he’d ever done before. She alone could push the nightmares away. When would he ever see her again? It’s so unfair, he thought. Here am I, an innocent man, stuck in this filthy prison, which by rights is where that evil swine of a brother of mine ought to be. And where is my brother?

  A voice hissed in his ear, “Is it true, signore, that your brother still keeps a suite at the Bagliadi in Bologna, one of the most expensive hotels in Italy? And that he has the local police chiefs over to dinner once a month? Pfffff. What a guy. What an incredible g-g-g-gug-g—”

  Luciano spun round. The queue behind him had scattered, as if they’d discovered a plague victim in their midst. Luciano’s garrulous colleague had fallen to his knees, his sightless eyes fixed on Luciano’s navel as he slowly toppled toward the floor, the sharpened handle of a spoon embedded in his neck, his silenced tongue proving once and for all that dead men don’t tell tales.

  Letting Go

  Hearing her husband howl like a wolf had shocked Baci out of her assumption that justice would prevail. He is innocent, she wanted to scream. Can’t you see? The Luciano she knew and loved would never, could never harm another living being. Her heart hammered in her chest and she felt as if she were about to faint. Inside her, the unborn baby uncurled from its furled slumbers, its limbs twitching frantically. What? it wailed silently. What fresh hell is this?

  As Luciano’s howls echoed round the courtroom, the repulsive Munro MacAlister Hall wrapped a heavy arm around Baci’s shoulders and she felt the first stirrings of real fear. She was no lawyer, but even with a layman’s understanding of what had occurred in court, it looked as if the fabled Munro MacAlister Hall had just ensured that Luciano was indeed sent to prison. But why? He was supposed to be keeping Luciano out of prison. Something was seriously wrong. MacAlister Hall was acting like the prosecution, not the defense. And if he didn’t stop patting her like—like that, she was going to take a swing at him with her handbag. Something of this must have shown in her expression because he suddenly backed off, swept his papers into a briefcase, and gave her a cursory nod.

  “I must run, signora. Time is money. I’ll be in touch in due course.” And without offering a single word of comfort regarding Luciano’s plight, Munro MacAlister Hall left the building.

  Thankfully, the ghastly slurping mud-sucking sounds had stopped and the moat was now officially drained. A band of yellow and black crime-scene tape fluttered forlornly in the chilly breeze, cordoning off the area from everyone except the Serious Crimes Unit. The rose-quartz drive was smeared with decaying lily pads and, in the absence of master, mistress, and now moat, Tock had decamped to the guest bathroom on the first floor of StregaSchloss. The blank windows of the house reflected two figures standing on the rose quartz, the smaller one hunched and shivering, hands jammed in pockets, the larger one waving its arms around while taking a meager rucksack out of the back of its car and dropping it onto the drive. Drawing the collar of his cashmere coat up against the cold, Munro MacAlister Hall slammed the back door of the Range Rover and turned to his scowling son.

  “Right. I’m off. Have you got everything?” he barked, aware that he was going to miss his flight if he didn’t get a move on. The client had been very specific. There was to be no face-to-face meeting. The money would be in a suitcase in the south-facing changing room of the Armani boutique on Via Fiscale-Castrato.…

  “Dad—”

  “What? I’m in a hurry, you know. D’you need more money?”

  “Dad. Is Titus’s dad really a—you know, a murderer?”

  Munro looked longingly at the driver’s seat of his car. Having spent approximately two precious minutes of his afternoon explaining to the Borgia children why Daddy wasn’t likely to be walking in through the front door at any point in the near future, Munro had just about exhausted his year’s allowance of tact and sensitivity.

  “Who cares?” he snapped. “Now. Out of my way. I’ve got business to attend to.” And seeing Rand’s stricken expression—“Oh, for crying out loud, don’t look at me like that, you pathetic excuse for a son”—he strode round to the driver’s door, hauled it open and climbed inside.

  Rand flinched as the big engine roared into life, his look of pure hatred glancing off the armored panels of his father’s car. Moments later the Range Rover had gone, leaving behind a cloud of dust and fumes in which stood a boy with a ghost-white face and fists clenching and unclenching with impotent rage.

  As the bloated Range Rover disappeared down the track in a cloud of dust, Latch took charge. Armed with a pen, a notepad, and the telephone, the butler had spent the next hour on the phone in Luciano’s study, trying to find out what had gone so disastrously wrong in court. Waiting in the kitchen for news of their father, Titus and Pandora had chewed their fingernails down to the quick by the time they heard Latch finish on the phone. Damp was in the garden being unamused by Minty, and the beasts were huddled round the kitchen range in a most uncharacteristic silence. The atmosphere of impending doom was so intense, Titus felt he was being buried alive.

  When Latch reappeared in the kitchen, he seemed to bring air, light, and sunshine in with him. Against all odds he made them believe that everything would come out right in the end. He hugged Pandora and patted Titus on the shoulder in a man-to-man fashion; he poured large cups of tea and suggested that with Luciano temporarily “detained,” Titus was now the man of the house. Then, spotting Titus’s expression of terror at this prospect, the butler added swiftly that because he’d been employed at StregaSchloss long before any of the children had been born, it might be a good idea if he were to take charge of the running of the house, instead of his young master or mistress being burdened with such matters. Not in charge of anything important, he had said, twinkling reassuringly at the children; just taking care of incidentals like—oh, all the cooking, shopping, driving, laundry, and bill paying. Also he could take care of supervising other members of staff, which with Marie Bain gone and Flo—Mrs. McLachlan missing, really only consisted of Miss Araminta.

  At this point Titus had to restrain himself from flinging his arms round Latch’s neck and weeping with relief.

  In the humming, ticking darkness of the freezer lay Strega-Nonna, oldest surviving Strega-Borgia, great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of Titus, Pandora, and Damp, deep-frozen at her own request till a cure was found for old age. Beneath her foil-wrapped body a bag of frozen peas shifted, this in turn causing a plastic box full of tiny deep-frozen clones to dream of an invasion by green asteroids. Strega-Nonna’s lips moved imperceptibly, forming one syllable of denial.

  No …

  Her hands now scrabbled frantically, breaking free of the layers of protective tinfoil, scraping against the lid of the freezer; her nails removing the rime of frost covering the helpful tips printed there: MEAT, 3 MONTHS; FISH, 1 MONTH; BREAD, 1 MONTH; ANCESTORS, 600 YEARS.

  Again her lips moved, this time twice.

  Flora. Flooooraaaaaaaa.

  Since her voice was no louder than the beating of moth wings on a lampshade, it was hardly surprising that no one heard her cries.

  Hellllllp, she breathed. I’ve gone and lost Flora’s thread.

  Many frozen moments of ticking darkness passed while Strega-Nonna regretted the loss of spontaneity that comes from being packed in permafrost. Not for the first time, she wished that medical science would speed up the work she hoped they were doing to find a cure for old age. Though for once, she comforted herself, it wasn’t extreme decrepitude to blame for losing Flora’s magic thread. Someone has been in my freezer, disturbing my slumbers, she decided. Some hungry family member, no doubt, in too much of a hurry to notice that they’d pulled Flora’s thread from my grasp along with their fish fungus and coven fries. The t
hread, she mourned. Oh, confound it. I’m going to have to defreeze myself. Exfrost? Unchill? It would take about seventy-two hours in a warm kitchen before she could safely be said to have defrosted, and only then could she begin to search for her lost thread. Bother. Bother, drat, blast, and a pox on it. A plague on its houses, a blight on its policies.

  Again Strega-Nonna’s fingers scrabbled in the darkness, and again they found nothing save for the remote control, which, when pressed, began the lengthy defrosting process. The ancient bones beneath her skin gleamed white as her fingers clamped down on the keypad and cut the power supply to the freezer. Right, she thought. Get me out of here. The remote fell from her hand, sliding over a bag of oven fries and coming to rest beside a box of fish fingers. Strega-Nonna forced her heart to slow down once more while she waited in the dark for movement to return to her limbs, her thoughts spinning freely in circles. Where was that thread? Was it lost forever? How would Flora ever return without it?

  The thread was the magical equivalent of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs; without it Strega-Nonna feared that Flora would be doomed to wander in the dark forest forever. If that was where she was. Strega-Nonna never asked, and Flora never told. There had been many times over the centuries when she’d reeled her friend back to safety on the end of that thread, like an angler landing a fish. Sometimes, Flora had fairly flown back, the thread spiraling in silver coils, spinning through Strega-Nonna’s fingers; other times, she had been a dead weight, drained by some unspoken event, barely able to assist in her own return. But never before had the thread been lost or broken.

  Entombed in ice, Strega-Nonna nearly wept with frustration at her own powerlessness. She’d hoped to cheat death by choosing the half-life of the cryogenically preserved, but as the centuries had rolled past, she realized that the only person she was cheating was herself. Friends, lovers, husbands, and children had grown old and died as Strega-Nonna passed through cycles of freezing and defrosting like a human ice floe. Time upon time she would find herself burying a loved one and swearing that this time she would allow death to claim her; but over and over a little voice in her head would say, Not yet. Just a little more time, Amelia. Who knows, a day might come when humans won’t have to die. Let’s not go just yet, Amelia.

  It had been very persuasive, that little voice. Strega-Nonna had listened to its seductive whisper for over six hundred years and had built a life of sorts around staying alive, even if most of that life was no life at all, but merely a state of suspended animation. But now … she was tired of waiting. Human beings were never going to be immortal, no matter how much they might strive to be. The bittersweet knowledge of their own mortality was the very thing that made them human. Take that away, she decided, and they had as much heart as—as an ice floe. So. It was time, she thought. Time to go. Find the thread, reel Flora back in, and allow herself to become part of the earth that had nourished her for all these long years. Let her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren plant a tree above her, so that one day some tiny particle of her, some atom of herself would rejoice in the feel of the wind and the sun and the welcome rain once more. With luck, she would get to hold the newest little Strega-Borgia before—

  In the distance the phone rang several times, then stopped. The normal sounds of StregaSchloss wove their soporific spell around Strega-Nonna and she drifted off once more, her fingers reflexively clutching a thread that wasn’t there, her walnut-wrinkly face gathered into a puzzled frown.

  One of Us

  The raspberries had defrosted and dissolved into a magenta puddle by the time Damp remembered that she’d been supposed to be counting them out to bolster the apple crumble Latch had intended to serve at supper time. Now, it was debatable whether anyone would have any appetite left after the grumpy man had driven away in his big black car. Supper lay in its component parts across the kitchen table, Latch had gone to find Minty, Titus was making headache-inducing sounds upstairs with Rand, and Pandora had retreated with a book to her bedroom. Left alone in the kitchen, Damp wondered why everyone was pretending not to know when Mummy and Daddy would come home. Why did Mummy have to go to hostiple and see Auntie Naytil? Who was Auntie Naytil anyway? Why was Daddy unable to get away from work? Daddy always used to go into the library and say he was going to work. Why did everyone think Damp wasn’t clever enough to spot all the big fat lies that were piling up, one on top of the other, like a badly made Lego tower?

  Perched on the rim of a teapot high up on the china dresser, Tarantella was knitting a tiny vest for one of her daughters out of a surplus length of spider silk and was disinclined to answer questions.

  “Haven’t you anything better to do?” she inquired peevishly as Damp stirred the raspberries into pink sludge with her index finger. “In the absence of both your parents you really ought to consider leaving home and getting a job. I left home when I was three weeks old. Still, at least you’ve finally perfected toilet training. For the supposed master race, you lot are surprisingly slow to work out what those big white porcelain things with flush mechanisms are for.” Sighing mightily, Tarantella peered at her knitting and mumbled to herself, “Knit one, purl two, transfer next three stitches to cable needle and drop down back of work, purl two, knit one—” She broke off, staring at the silver thread Damp was wrapping round her thumb. With a gasp, the tarantula scampered down from her vantage point and swung onto the kitchen table.

  “Did you spin that yourself?” she gasped in awed tones, reaching out to stroke the thread with one leg. “It’s remarkably fine work—all the more so considering you’re an absolute beginner.” Tarantella bestowed on Damp her toothiest and most encouraging smile, her mouthparts agape.

  Damp gazed at the silver thread wound round her thumb, then peered at the grinning tarantula. Feeling mystified as to what Tarantella was talking about, she popped her thumb into her mouth while she considered what to do next.

  “Auuuuuk,” squawked Tarantella, her seven legs giving way beneath her. “Oh, the horror, the horror—don’t do that.”

  Damp’s mouth opened and she hauled her thumb back out again, remembering that in common with this bossy tarantula, Mrs. McLachlan had also commanded her to remove her thumb from her mouth when the occasion demanded. She looked at her thumb in confusion, wondering just what it was about this digit in particular that roused such passionate antipathy in grown-ups. Suddenly she noticed that the silvery thread was not only wrapped several times around her thumb; it also snaked across the kitchen table and disappeared out of the door to the herb garden. Climbing down from her seat, Damp tugged on the thread to see if it would stretch or snap. Instead, it gave a distant deep twonggg, as if a giant cello string had been plucked on the other side of the world. Intrigued, she tugged again, and once more the same far-off bass note sounded.

  From the kitchen table, Tarantella coughed pointedly. “When you’ve quite finished,” she began. “As I was saying, I think it’s high time you began your proper education. You’re a baby witch, in case you’ve forgotten. Now that you’ve finished your flying lessons with that vulgar bat, I think I ought to teach you some basic web design, hmmm?”

  Damp looked with longing at her silver thread, desperate to discover what lay at its other end. However, she was aware that Tarantella was making her a most generous and unrepeatable offer and would be mortally offended if she declined. Swallowing her impatience to follow the thread to its conclusion, Damp stuffed it under the cushion of her chair, climbed on top of it, and smiled at Tarantella with affection.

  “Tan’tella, show me. Please, thank you.”

  “Rrrrright.” Tarantella extruded a long length of perfect silk and held it up for Damp to admire. “Don’t touch. Today I shall demonstrate how to wrap your dinner, your enemies, your larder, and anything else that takes your fancy.”

  “Hurry up, please,” Damp demanded abruptly. “Not-nanny Toothpaste coming soon.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Tarantella frowned. “Hurry up? Do you think these kind
s of skills can be learned in one easy lesson? These are arcane secrets I am about to divulge to you; arachnid lore passed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken thread of wisdom that has flowed from generation to gen—”

  “Tan’tella?” Damp whispered. “You’re like me, aren’t you?”

  Surprisingly the tarantula didn’t snort in derision or fall about laughing at such human presumption. Instead, she blinked several times in rapid succession and then said, “I’m impressed, humanchild. I wouldn’t have expected you to put that one together for years yet. Yes. We’re the same. I’m one of you, you’re one of us. I chose a spider form, and you chose to be human. Pffffff. Poor you. No matter. You can always change your mind next time round. Now, enough. Don’t interrupt. You have a lot of catching up to do. Today, we’re going to learn wrapping. Watch verrrry closely—here we go …”

  The Moral Munros

  Rand glared at Titus across the expanse of balding rug that graced the floor of his guest bedroom.

  “What’s your problem?” he sneered, raising the drumsticks above the high hat prior to bringing them down so fast and hard that further conversation proved to be impossible until the afterecho of clashing cymbals had faded to a dull hiss.