‘Except when we don’t have any clothes on,’ said Morbid. Silent sniggered.
‘You could always sew it onto your ear,’ said Merlinmary, having a happy little daydream of blood dripping from everyone’s head.
‘Well, it still needs a bit of work,’ said Winchflat. He stood up and his trousers fell round his ankles with a crash.
‘As I was saying,’ he explained, ‘it still needs a bit of work. I’ve managed to make it really small but it still weighs three hundred kilos.’
There were a few teething problems. Whenever anyone wearing a detector went within fifty metres of traffic lights they would suddenly change – not from red to green or green to red but into giant three-metre-tall pink marshmallows. Funny things happened at supermarket checkouts, too, whenever anyone wearing a Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device passed by in the street. If the customer was a nice person, their bill would come out as twenty-five cents, no matter how much they had bought. If they were a nasty person, their credit card would melt inside the machine so they couldn’t buy anything.
Even when Winchflat sorted out all the problems, sometimes as an aeroplane flew over the Floods’ house all its toilets would flush for no reason. Eventually it was agreed that just Winchflat would wear the Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device, and he would tell the others if it went into danger mode – which it had.
‘Well, we can’t just stay here in these rotting coffins,’ said Merlinmary. ‘I’m getting backache.’
‘And I’m getting mould between my toes,’ said Satanella.
‘You’ve always got mould between your toes,’ said Morbid.
‘Oh yes, so I have.’
The children were each hiding inside a coffin in the school graveyard and, as coffins are usually made to hold only one person and some of the bodies still had quite a bit of meat on them and were leaking, the children were all feeling very uncomfortable and damp in unpleasant places.
‘I think the first thing we need to do is get out of here,’ said Winchflat. ‘Then we’ll decide the best place to hide and how to get there.’
‘OK,’ said Merlinmary. ‘How about we all dig downwards and meet in the catacombs. At least the corpses are less leaky there.’
‘It’s always catacombs, isn’t it?’ Merlinmary complained. ‘Why can’t they ever be dogacombs?’
‘Hold on, everyone,’ said Winchflat. ‘Before you start digging, I better check where the Hearse Whisperer is.’ He switched on his Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device. ‘That’s strange, she appears to be burying a dead body on a little island off Tristan da Cunha.’
They didn’t know that the dead body was the fake professor and that the Hearse Whisperer had just stolen it from the school.
‘That is strange,’ said Satanella. ‘Why would she go there?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Winchflat. ‘But the really strange thing is why she’s burying it. I mean, she usually eats dead bodies or drops them off tall buildings onto innocent passers-by.’
‘Maybe it’s like squirrels when they bury nuts to eat later,’ said Satanella.
‘No, I reckon she’s probably hiding it,’ said Merlinmary.
‘At least it should be safe to move from these coffins at the moment,’ said Winchflat. ‘Let’s go.’
When they gathered at the cemetery gate, they saw the wanted posters. They were stuck on every available flat surface they could see.
‘I hate that picture of me,’ said Satanella. ‘It makes me look like a hairy Jack Russell and I hate Jack Russells – nasty little hyperactive balls of gristle.’
‘I think now might be a good time to leave,’ said Winchflat. ‘While those idiot FSI people are asleep and the Hearse Whisperer is busy.’
So they went down into the catacombs, finished picking the bits of flaky corpse off each other, sprayed themselves with FesterClear air freshener, which Winchflat always carried in one of his many Very Useful Pockets, and discussed the best place to go and hide.
‘How about Patagonia?’ said Merlinmary. ‘I’ve always wanted to go there.’
‘Umm, yes, brilliant,’ said Satanella. ‘Except we’re actually in Patagonia right now.’
‘Oh. It’s not at all how I imagined it would be from the David Attenborough programmes.’
‘The last place the Hearse Whisperer would look would be Tristan da Cunha,’ said Morbid. ‘If we wait until she leaves, we could go and hide on the island where she’s burying the dead body.’
‘That,’ said Winchflat, ‘is a brilliant idea. The trouble is that because it is so brilliant and the last place she would look, it’s probably the first place she would check.’
‘No, no,’ said Silent inside Winchflat’s head, ‘the last place she would look would be Transylvania Waters.’
‘That’s way too risky,’ said Winchflat. ‘Even though no one from there has ever seen us so they wouldn’t know who we were.’
‘We could stay here,’ said Merlinmary.
‘Second place she’ll look and first place those FSI people will look,’ said Winchflat. ‘No, I have an idea. We’ll go and visit my internet friend, Lord Clacton.’
‘Who?’ said Merlinmary, Satanella and the twins.
‘Lord Clacton. He’s my best friend and, for a human, quite intelligent,’ Winchflat explained. ‘He’s often helped me with some of my inventions and I’m helping him build a time machine. It’ll be the perfect place to go. I’ve never met him, not in person, and he lives in a deserted desert village fifty-three miles from the nearest town, which is miles from anywhere.’
‘Where’s that?’ said Satanella.
‘Timbuktu.’
‘Isn’t that a type of parrot?’ said Merlinmary.
Once they had established that Timbuktu was a city in North Africa and not a type of parrot, they had to decide how to get from the remote Patagonian valley near the bottom of South America to the remote Saharan town in North Africa. They could:
Walk: Mostly this would mean walking under water or on top of the water. All witches can of course do both, but it was a very long way and Satanella in particular had very short legs.
Fly: The obvious choice, which meant it was the most risky. Not only would the Hearse Whisperer be scanning the air, but so would the FSI people.
Use a Star Trek Transporter: Difficult because there is no such thing.
Post: Send themselves in a big parcel.
Use Winchflat’s Shrink-You-As-Small-As-A-Speck-Of-Dust-Transport-You-Somewhere-Then-Enlarge-You-Again-Machine– aka the Zoomy Thing.32
Although Winchflat’s Zoomy Thing was the size of a wardrobe and normally lived in his bedroom at home in Acacia Avenue, by an incredible stroke of good luck, the last time he’d left home he had shrunk it down small enough to fit into yet another of his Very Useful Pockets and brought it to school with him.
He had never done this before.
‘I don’t know why I brought it,’ he said as he restored it to its full size. ‘Just some strange premonition – a sort of Oprah moment, I suppose.’
They all squeezed inside, Winchflat fiddled with the controls and they vanished.
‘Are you sure this is the Sahara?’ said Merlinmary, opening the wardrobe door a crack and peering out. ‘It’s raining extremely hard and if you don’t do something in the next 3.1 seconds a very big red double-decker London bus is going to hit us in about 3.2 seconds.’
Winchflat did something and muttered about stupid dyslexic keyboards.
‘Is that better?’ he said when they stopped being a mass of molecules whizzing through space and time.
‘Well, the bus has gone,’ said Merlinmary.
‘But it’s still raining and we’re still sitting in the middle of a road in London?’ said Winchflat.
‘I think so, except there are horses now and everyone’s wearing really old-fashioned clothes,’ said Merlinmary. ‘Still, there’s good news too.’
‘What?’ said Winchflat, twisting knobs and pushing buttons.
&nbs
p; ‘It’s just stopped raining.’
Winchflat finally realised what he’d been doing wrong.
‘I was using the co-ordinates I’d use if we were at home, not at school. I’ll have to re-calculate,’ he said.
‘Well, you’d better hurry up,’ said Merlinmary, pulling the door shut. ‘There are three evil-looking villains approaching and I think they’re highwaymen.’
‘You know, the nineteenth century would be a great place to hide,’ said Morbid as a loud pounding began on the outside of the wardrobe.
Merlinmary clicked her fingers and there were three piercing screams, followed by silence. When she opened the door again, there were three very well-toasted robbers lying on the ground.
‘Ooh, toasties,’ said Satanella, sniffing the air. ‘I like toasties.’
‘That’s odd,’ said Winchflat. ‘The Zoomy thing’s not designed to travel through time. That’s the last time I buy a calculator made in Belgium.’
Winchflat finished his calculations, pressed the buttons, and they landed on Lord Clacton’s doormat in the deserted desert village of Kalibarquorumire.
Lord Clacton was the image of an absent-minded professor. His buttons were in the wrong holes, he was wearing odd socks – on his hands – and he had an omelette in his shirt pocket. Like all true geniuses, he lived in another world, a magic place where normal people only go when they have a very high fever. The upside of this was that the sudden appearance of five strange-looking young wizards in a wardrobe on his doorstep didn’t upset or frighten him at all.
‘Yes, absolutely, of course, quite so,’ he said. ‘Winchflat Flood, I presume.’
‘Lord Clacton,’ said Winchflat, and the two of them exchanged a strange handshake that was nothing like the secret Freemason’s handshake, but exactly like the Secret-Planetary-Network-of-Genius-Nerds-Special-Handshake, only more mysterious.
‘Come, we have much to do,’ said Lord Clacton. ‘The time machine is at an exciting stage of development. I take it that’s why you are here.’
‘Well, dear friend,’ said Winchflat, sounding more like a forty-five-year-old scientist than a fifteen-year-old wizard. ‘That’s not why we came. Much as I would like nothing more than to get your invention working, we came here to hide. We need to lie low for a while.’
Lord Clacton, like most absent-minded boffins, took every word at its literal meaning. He lived in a little world of his own that few people, apart from Winchflat, could imagine, never mind visit. That, combined with his very formal well-mannered upbringing at Castle Clacton in England, meant that he was far too polite to ask the Floods what they were hiding from.33
‘Well, you’re in luck,’ Lord Clacton said. ‘I believe this is the only house in the whole of the Sahara with a cellar, so if you all go down there and stretch out on the floor you will be lying lower than anyone else for thousands of miles.’
Winchflat didn’t even try to begin to explain so, after a meal of cucumber sandwiches, scones and tea brought by a very, very old butler, the five Flood children went and lay down on the cellar floor.
‘Do you think his lordship would mind if I ate those spiders?’ said Merlinmary, pointing up at the ceiling.
‘You can never tell with Clacton,’ said Winchflat. ‘They could be part of some experiment, or not even spiders at all.’
‘So, is this time machine he’s building real?’ said Morbid. ‘Because if it is, I was wondering if we could use it to go back to just before the dead professor appeared at school and wait by the graveyard gates and do something about it.’
‘The last I heard from Clacton was that it was working, but he had forgotten to get inside it before he sent it back in time, so now he doesn’t know where it is,’ said Winchflat.
‘Ah.’
‘But I like your idea, so maybe we should help his lordship recover the machine,’ said Winchflat.
‘Wouldn’t it be simpler to make another one?’ Merlinmary suggested. ‘He must have drawn up some plans.’
‘I did indeed, old chap. Safely locked away, they are,’ said Lord Clacton when they went upstairs to try to help him.
‘Well, there you are then, problem solved,’ said Merlinmary.
‘Not really,’ said Lord Clacton.
‘You’ve lost the key?’
‘No, I have it right here,’ said his lordship. ‘I’ve lost the drawer the key fits into.’
‘It’s part of the time machine, isn’t it?’ said Winchflat.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Satanella. ‘Why don’t we make a time machine and go back in time until just before his lordship sent his time machine away … Oh.’
‘Couldn’t we just go back in your Zoomy Thing?’ said Morbid.
‘Well, theoretically we could,’ said Winchflat. ‘But we would need to know the exact date to go back to, otherwise we could end up completely lost.’
‘So what’s the problem?’ said Merlimary. ‘Just get his lordship to tell you what time he sent it to and go back just before that.’
Lord Clacton blushed and began fiddling with a cactus growing in a pot on the windowsill.
‘He can’t tell the time,’ Winchflat whispered to the others. ‘He’s a brilliant genius, but totally useless about things that have numbers in them, like times tables and clocks.’
‘Gone? What do you mean, gone?’ said the headmaster.
‘We were, umm, well, briefly distracted,’ said Grusom. ‘And when we stopped being distracted the body had vanished.’
‘Maybe it just wandered off,’ said the headmaster. ‘Have you checked the grounds?’
‘It was dead,’ said Avid. ‘How could it wander off?’
‘My dear young lady,’ said the headmaster, ‘you are forgetting that this is a wizard school – several of our students have been dead for years. In fact, if a student fails their exams, they can re-do the whole year as a corpse so that when they get to the next year, they haven’t got any older.’
Avid nodded, blushing slightly, partly at the idea that some of the things wandering around the school could be dead, partly due to the memory of writhing around on the floor in hysterics, partly because of where the magic beans that had fallen down her blouse had ended up,34 and partly from feeling stupid at losing an entire dead body.
‘Bodies don’t just vanish,’ continued the headmaster. ‘Have you checked with Elanora Bedlam? She didn’t make it into soup, did she? She does love her Corpse and Onion Soup. Can’t stand it myself. The onions give me wind, though I adore the gristle.’
Avid wondered which she would rather do, faint or throw up. Unable to decide, she did neither.
‘So I suppose, if you wanted to,’ Grusom suggested, ‘seeing as how there is no dead body as evidence, you could actually sort of pretend that there had never been a murder here at all and we could just quietly leave and keep quiet about the whole thing.’
He was hoping the headmaster would like this plan, because he knew that if word ever got out that he and Avid had had a corpse vanish from right under their noses – though it was actually above their noses as they had been lying on the floor at the time – it would make them the laughing stock of every forensic science laboratory around the world.
‘Yes, that is one option,’ said the headmaster, ‘but I think there are too many people here who know that’s not the case. Sure, we’re wizards and I could just cast a Forget-You-Ever-Saw-A-Dead-Professor-Spell over the whole valley, but some of my more wealthy students have been injected with the Fabergé Seriously-Expensive-Anti-Spell-Serum, so the spell wouldn’t work on them – and, like lots of seriously wealthy children, they are nasty, snotty little troublemakers, just the sort to go selling a story to the papers. So I think we need to do Plan B.’
‘Which is?’
‘We will clone your dead professor.’
‘Human cloning is a myth,’ said Grusom and Avid together.
‘Not if you’re a wizard or a witch,’ said the headmaster. ‘It’s easy. Even
our seven-year-olds can do it. Now I’m sure you’ve got some of those little plastic bags you people always seem to have containing little bits of nasty stuff you scraped off Professor Randolf Open-Graves. So you go off and fetch them while I send for Doctor Mordant, our genetic engineering and cloning teacher.’35
Doctor Mordant was not at his best. As usual, he had been doing genetic engineering experiments on himself. He had finally settled on two as the best number of heads and legs, though he was still deciding what sort of feet he wanted. At the moment he had one human foot and one really huge elephant’s foot, which kept catching on the furniture and tripping him up. He was going to try mountain goat’s feet next as he had read that they were very agile at climbing up and down almost anything without falling off. On this particular day he had replaced all his fingers with cucumbers, which made it impossible for him to pick anything up, including his Genetic Engineering Instruction Book, which he needed to undo the spell.
‘I just need a bit of help here,’ he said out of a third mouth somewhere inside his trousers. ‘Then I’ll be right with you.’
Avid held up the book and turned the pages until he asked her to stop. He closed his eyes, muttered some silent secret words and his fingers and thumbs stopped being vegetables, though his ears appeared to have turned into two large ham sandwiches. More muttering and more secret words and his fingers changed from hairy goldfish back into normal fingers and his ears back into ears, though ones that would have looked better on a big rabbit.
‘Phew, that’s better,’ he said from the mouth in his left face. ‘Now how can I help you?’
The headmaster explained what had happened and Grusom handed Doctor Mordant a plastic bag containing some stuff he had retrieved from under the dead professor’s fingernails.
‘OK, better stand back,’ said Doctor Mordant, tipping the tiny grey speck onto the table. ‘These things can be unpredictable. Do you know exactly what this sample is?’
‘No,’ said Avid, reading the label on the sample bag. ‘We haven’t had time to complete our analysis. It came from beneath the professor’s right index finger.’
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