Pure Dead Batty

by Debi Gliori

  He checked; turned his focus out rather than in. The nanny was still out cold, the gentle rise and fall of her breath drawing Titus in an altogether different direction from the island in the middle of Lochnagargoyle—

  Blinking rapidly, he forced himself to refocus. Obediently Titus’s memory delivered up the blue lochan, the pebbly shore, and a little campfire burning brightly, its hopeful flames a reminder that some unseen hand must have gathered kindling and logs; possibly even the same hand that had laid out Mrs. McLachlan’s clothes on a rock, all of them folded perfectly—these were the truths to which he had clung. Now, two long months later, fatherless and somewhat adrift in a sea of feelings he barely understood, Titus once again needed proof that Mrs. McLachlan was alive.

  The rational part of his mind cleared its throat, elbowed past the tearful childlike part, and began to assert itself, pacing back and forth like a tetchy schoolteacher, lacking only a pointer and a blackboard to complete the picture of a pedantic pedagogue. Sure, Pandora had the photographs, but what exactly did they prove? These days everyone knew that you could make a photograph say anything you wanted it to say with the click of a mouse. Yes, yes, Minty had suffered some kind of seizure—psychotic episode—well, hallucination then—call it what you will—but the fact remained that hearing portraits speak to her was only proof that the young woman was totally unsuitable for her current job. Who on earth had hired her? The same person who bought unicorn toe-jam off the Internet and grated it over her children’s dinners? And what could this person have been thinking to put such an unstable character as Minty in charge of a vulnerable, bereaved toddler like Damp?

  Unable to bear the direction in which his thoughts were taking him, Titus mumbled something to Pandora about going to the bathroom, promising that he wouldn’t let their mother catch sight of him, swearing that he’d hide down the toilet if necessary to avoid discovery. Pandora was too consumed by the intricacies of files and data retrieval to pay Titus much attention, Minty was snoring faintly and endearingly on the floor, and Latch had taken the transformed Rand downstairs to see if anything could be done to return him to his normal state.

  Titus sneaked out of his bedroom and tiptoed downstairs without incident. As he crept past the kitchen, he could hear Latch’s deep voice explaining to his mother about the sudden outbreak of German measles, interrupted by shrill wails from, he presumed, the catastrophically altered Rand. Moments later, when he turned off the corridor and took the stairs to the level below StregaSchloss’s central courtyard, all sounds faded to silence. Since summer, when Tarantella’s daughters had hatched, the flagged passageway leading to the map room had become festooned with cobwebs, all of them lumpy, bumpy, and unraveling like badly knitted socks. Shuddering with disgust, Titus crawled past on his hands and knees, preferring this indignity to the risk of becoming entangled in Tarantella’s daughters’ amateurish attempts at web design.

  There were hundreds of them, he realized, knees aching with the wintry chill permeating up from the flagstones beneath him. And had the corridor always been this long? He crawled onward, forcing himself not to scream as dangling skeins of spider silk brushed his ears, tangled in his eyelashes, stuck to his—With a sob of sheer relief he saw that ahead of him lay the door to the map room, standing slightly ajar, a faint light glowing behind it. Heart hammering in anticipation, Titus crawled in, praying that the web makers hadn’t got this far. To his relief, not so much as a single cobweb spanned a corner cornice or dimly lit dado.

  Feeling faintly silly, he stood up, aware that he’d still have to confront his arachnophobia and retrace his footsteps, or knee-shuffles, back along the corridor and upstairs. For the moment he was engaged in reacquainting himself with the peculiar atmosphere of this, one of the oldest rooms in StregaSchloss. Because of its location below the central courtyard, the map room had never been lit naturally. The combination of thick stone walls and no windows made the room feel muffled; thick with silence and acoustically dead. Indeed, the map room seemed to swallow sound whole, encouraging visitors to become silent and fall into a wordless reverie. This, added to the lack of daylight, had probably been the reason why it had rarely been used for anything other than maps. Successive generations of Strega-Borgias had avoided its cloistered confines, preferring the open spaces of any of the other ninety-five rooms afforded within StregaSchloss’s generously proportioned walls. Here, unfaded by daylight, hung the family’s collection of antique maps, most of which had been drawn by one of what Titus secretly thought of as the Great-Great-Etceteras—those endless ranks of old dead Strega-Borgias whose portraits hung in the Ancestors’ Room. Come to think of it, hadn’t it been the map-making Great-Great-Etcetera whom Minty had met? Said she’d met? Hallucinated? Dreamed—

  Titus rubbed his eyes. What was he doing down here in the map room if not following a dream himself? If he and Pandora really had seen Mrs. McLachlan’s clothes carefully depicted in that antique map, then Minty could well have met her Apollonius the Geek.

  The rational part of his mind retreated, muttering balefully to itself into a dark corner of Titus’s head, allowing him to engage psychic hyperdrive and let his imagination soar unchecked. It was like dreaming, he thought. Like one of those dreams of flying when you were aware that flying defied the laws of gravity and was therefore impossible; but there you were, going ahead and doing it anyway. However, before he followed this dream to its conclusion, he had to check.

  A single hammered brass lamp shone over the fireplace, illuminating the object he’d come to see. Titus stepped forward, all the better to examine this most beautiful of all the maps in the collection. There was StregaSchloss, reduced to a postage-stamp-sized image; in this version of itself, missing the Georgian and Victorian additions—all the turrets and most of the chimneys hadn’t appeared till years later, but in the century when the map was drawn, frequent sieges and battles meant that houses had to be built to withstand attack. Hence the central courtyard over the map room, in which to keep animals; the dungeons to store prisoners and supply the house with a source of water; the meter-thick stone walls to prevent the house being set alight; and finally, the moat surrounding the whole, a deterrent to all but the most determined invader. Titus’s eyes tracked across the map; across the formal garden, its intricate yew hedging burned during the oil crisis in the 1700s; the parterre, filled in now; the rose arbor; and then across the meadow, down to the loch and out, skimming across the water to the little island …

  He must have made some sound then, some mew of disbelief, although he wasn’t aware of doing so. For a moment he was too intent on trying to breathe, to rediscover some measure of his equilibrium as, all around him, the room spun and those ever-so-solid walls moved in and out with each of his hammering heartbeats. Briefly, he thought he was going to pass out with the sickening cocktail of fright, grief, and sheer horror. In the center of the map an impossible black stain had appeared. It almost obliterated the island—the island where he had hoped to see some evidence of Damp and Mrs. McLachlan. The black stain was moving, sweeping across the map like a cloud shadow, discoloring all in its wake. As it moved, it changed shape, from an ink-black arrow to a grainy spiral nebula, moving and shifting as it swallowed the island in the middle of Lochnagargoyle. Steeling himself to look closer, Titus stepped up to the map and searched for what he now hoped wasn’t there.

  Death at Sea

  A wind that had ignored the shipping forecast howled and shrieked out of the north, snowballed down the west coast of Scotland, and turned into a storm-force-ten gale as it hit Argyll. Despite this, the trawler put out to sea; its crew huddled below decks, relying on computers to plot their course out to the deep-sea fishing fields. The trawler’s skipper was obliged to set out no matter how bad the weather was, frequently sailing into the teeth of almost biblical storms in the hope of landing enough fish to repay the bank loan he’d needed to buy the trawler in the first place. He looked up from another depressing set of sums he was scrawling on the back of hi
s bank statement, just as a particularly high wave made his tea slop over the rim of his mug and turned all his financial calculations into a damp smear. This, he thought, was the kind of night when some fishermen wished they’d chosen to study marine ecology rather than contributing to its collapse. This was the kind of night when the sea heaved and swelled like a living beast; each crest and trough bigger than the last; the deeps so deep they could swallow a man, his crew, his entire trawler (but not, alas, his marine mortgage) without so much as a ripple.

  A white blip appeared on the screen in front of the skipper, causing him to catch his breath. He leaned forward, keying in a command, knocking over his mug of tea as the image on the screen slowly changed. Now, pixel by pixel, came the picture of something floating off-stern, something on a collision course with his trawler. Without a second’s hesitation he stood up, grabbed an oilskin and a bullhorn, and headed outside. In the icy, blustery hell on deck, he staggered around like a drunken man, hand over hand along the railings, amazed as ever at the sheer raw power of the sea as it foamed and roared around him. With a frozen hand, he groped for the switch to turn on the floodlights and couldn’t at first believe what he was seeing. A boat? This was not the kind of night to be out on a tiny tattered dinghy. What on earth were they playing at? He’d hardly seen it in the darkness. God Almighty, he’d nearly mowed it down—had the men on board no sense at all? Three of them, clinging to the sides. Were they blind—or insane—or … or what?

  He raised the bullhorn to his lips, to tell them, yell at them, swear, scream—he had no idea what he was going to say to a suicidal raggle-taggle bunch of sea gypsies—what could he say? Then all thoughts of boats, of fish, of money, of anything other than his baby daughter’s face and his wife’s eyes

  all other thoughts were driven from his head. One of the figures in the rowboat turned to face him, its pale eyes locking with his,

  please, not yet, let me hold my child once more, kiss my wife, at least get to say goodbye

  and it opened its awful mouth to smile—at him—at where he clung to the rail, frozen with dread.

  “Later,” it said. “Same place, another time, though, huh? Go home, you fool—don’t you know you could die out here?”

  And laughing—laughing?—Death and his oarsmen vanished into the deep.

  “Please don’t be sleep,” Damp begged, tugging at Mrs. McLachlan’s cardigan. The nanny lay on the shore, facedown on a little patch of snow-covered sand in between two rock pools. Snow was beginning to lie on her unmoving body; to powder her in white, just as she had once powdered her cakes and biscuits, sifting icing sugar over them until they too looked as if they’d had a light dusting of snow.

  “Wake UP,” Damp bawled, pulling at Mrs. McLachlan’s shoulder, hauling at her, pummeling her, flinging her little arms around her nanny’s neck; breathing in her face, stroking, patting, hugging, staring with increasing desperation at her silent, shuttered expression.

  Beside Flora, with both legs so badly bent they must have been broken in several places, lay the demon Isagoth, the slight rise and fall of his chest the only evidence that he’d survived the journey. In the howling maelstrom of frenzied bats escaping the island, it had been uncertain if anything living would survive the flight. Like all air travel, it had come at a price. The bats of Coire Chrone were rabid, had been so for years. For humans, their bites were invariably fatal; for immortals like Flora and Isagoth, one or two bites caused slight feelings of tiredness; three or four, deep weariness; over ten, exhaustion; but any greater accumulation of bites caused a frighteningly deep narcosis. First Isagoth was dragged upward, sucked out of sight by a gust of wind, his demented, gloating shrieks growing fainter and fainter as the bat venom overcame him. Next came Flora, silent and inert, raised horizontally into the darkening sky like a sacrifice to the storm. Then the wind took hold of her, her body angled upright and she spun round and round, faster and faster as, enveloped by a spiraling helix of bats, she was devoured by the storm.

  Hunched into a tiny ball of fright, Vesper shuddered. To think he’d been responsible for summoning those bats. So bloodthirsty. He’d never liked the taste of blood himself. The fleshiest thing he’d ever sunk his teeth into had been a mango, and even then he’d had to spend the next week obsessively picking fibrous strands of the fruit from between his fangs and flossing repeatedly with a length of coconut fiber. Watching this multitude of his fellow creatures latch on to first Isagoth and then Mrs. McLachlan had been almost more than Vesper could stand. Petrified that the bloodthirsty hordes might accidentally bite Damp, he’d begged the little witch to pull up her landing gear and go; and she could forget the inflight trolley service—due to the severity of the storm, the only thing they’d be needing on this trip were those handy little waterproof sick-bags. But Damp had refused to go. Despite all Vesper’s entreaties, she had stood on the shore, buffeted by the wind—at times almost blown flat by the force of it—waiting until her beloved nanny had been overcome by the bats and hoisted into the sky. Only then had she allowed Vesper to lead her up into the storm.

  And what a storm it had been. The noise was unrelenting, battering at their ears like a mob baying for blood. The din made them deaf; it blunted all their perceptions and rendered them dumb with shock. Then, just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, the temperature plummeted so far below zero that the air snapped and crackled; the wind speed adding a whole new arctic dimension to the concept of “freezing.” Fingers, wings, toes, and claws—no extremity was spared, all burned and stung. Vesper’s eyes streamed and Damp’s nose ran, then froze in mid-drip. It became increasingly hard to breathe, as if even their hearts and lungs were beginning to slow for want of antifreeze in the blood. The light had gone now, and Vesper’s ears strained to hear the squeaks of the bats of Coire Chrone, without whom he would have had no idea how to find his way home. Then the snow began; at first only isolated stinging flakes, then a flurry of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of needles of ice blown into their eyes and mouths by the vicious wind. Finally, to put the lid on their misery, the sharp ammoniac tang of bat-pee filled the air, burning their eyes and searing their noses with its inescapable bitter reek.

  Howling with fear and outrage, Damp flew for her life. Vesper clung to her like a living compass, guiding and encouraging as they pitted their tiny bodies against the full might of the weather. Years passed, or so it seemed to Damp, her clock running rapidly backward to once upon a time; then just as suddenly leaping forward through time to give her a snapshot of something that hadn’t happened yet, where she found herself sitting across a checked tablecloth from Mrs. McLachlan, a single dark rose in a glass on the table between them.

  She couldn’t make out what the nanny was saying, so, embarrassed by her failure to hear, she looked down at her hands to where a silver thread wrapped round her wrist like a bracelet, one end disappearing under the tablecloth, the other twined round the rose stem and crossing the table to where Mrs. McLachlan held it between her finger and thumb. Curious as to where the other end went, she bent to look under the table, finding, to her astonishment, not the stolid pillars of table legs and chairs, but a forest of tree trunks leading away into the distance.

  She looked up, wondering if she should ask permission before getting down from the table to explore this forest, but Mrs. McLachlan had gone, leaving three things behind on the tablecloth: a black marble, a tiny paintbrush, and a burning salamander, which, as Damp stared at him in wonder, seemed to sense the weight of her gaze and scuttled toward her, leaving a trail of singed footprints on the tablecloth behind him. The salamander stopped and looked up, his lagoon-blue stare infinitely sad, his whole being radiating loss.

  “You’re not her,” he stated reproachfully, the tablecloth smoldering around his fiery little body, “And heaventh, but it’th freething,” he added, seemingly unaffected by the little flames licking round his brassy belly.

  “Hello, snake,” Damp ventured, not entirely sure that she’d got t
his right, but wishing to appear friendly to this little beast.

  “Oh, thigh,” the salamander groaned, rolling his eyes and coughing as smoke from the smoldering tablecloth swirled around him. “I’m not a thnake, I’m a thalamander.”

  “You’re hot, hot, burny,” Damp pointed out helpfully, wondering if it would be impolite to pour the contents of the rose vase over the burning tablecloth. She could barely see the little creature for smoke and flames.

  “Blatht. I theem to have thet the table on fire,” the salamander complained. “Thuch a nuithanth.” And he vaulted down to disappear beneath the table with a swish of his flaming tail.

  Damp lifted the now impossibly heavy, burning tablecloth and peered into the darkness beneath …

  … and with a jarring, painfully bone-shaking crash, landed on the pebbly shore of Lochnagargoyle; no longer on the island, but home on the mainland, where she’d come from. As icy snow soaked through her clothes and her core temperature began to dip dangerously low, Damp tried her best to wake Mrs. McLachlan. Calling her name, over and over, tugging at her arms, she found herself almost overcome with weariness. Her hands were numb with cold, her feet too, and, ominously, she’d stopped shivering. Tucked inside her fleece, Vesper was too cold to complain, his tiny body hunched in a ball to conserve what little warmth he could.