Vessel tried to think nice thoughts, like himself and the Queen sitting hand in hand in a big hammock on the veranda watching the moon and listening to the owls tearing tiny mice to pieces in the moonlight. It was the most perfect daydream he had ever had and, since the Queen had shown that she cared for him as much as he cared for her, he had realised that the dream could actually become real. Yet it still seemed too good to be true.
And when something seems too good to be true, he thought, it usually is.
There was someone else in the room. Vessel knew he should have changed back from being a crow, but now, as he began the spell, the someone grabbed him round the neck, stuffed him into an enchanted birdcage and sprayed him with SuperStickIt, which meant he would stay in the form he was until he was rinsed off in the Terrible Pool of Vestor.
‘Change back now if you can,’ said the someone.
‘Hearse Whisperer?’ said Vessel.
‘Yes. You might have been clever enough to thwart Cliché, Stain and Ooze,’ said the Hearse Whisperer, back in her real form, ‘but you can’t fool me.’
‘Can we talk about this?’ said Vessel, playing for time to let Parsnip slip off into the night before the Hearse Whisperer saw him.
If his assistant could reach the Queen before the Hearse Whisperer – and if the Queen could actually understand what the crow was saying – the runaways would be able to escape and disappear into the heart of some big city.
‘What’s to talk about?’ said the Hearse Whisperer.
‘We could work together,’ said Vessel. ‘The Queen is the only one I care about, not the others. If I helped you and you agreed not to harm the Queen, we could easily kidnap Mordonna and take her back to the King.’
‘Umm, maybe,’ said the Hearse Whisperer, suspiciously. ‘I’m not sure I can trust you. I’ll sleep on it.’
She hung Vessel’s cage up on a hook and lay down on the floor to sleep.
Trapped in the enchanted cage, Vessel was powerless, but at least he had bought a good six hours’ time. He nibbled the cuttlefish stuck between the bars and fell into a deep depression.
He had failed his one true love. Even if the Hearse Whisperer fell for his trick and she did take Mordonna back to the King, the Queen would never forgive Vessel for any part he might have had in the plot. Also, he couldn’t stand the taste of cuttlefish. It tasted like something that had come out of the inside of a squid.
‘Will you stop with the wretched cuttlefish?’ the Hearse Whisperer snapped. ‘I’m trying to sleep.’
Meanwhile, Parsnip had reached the B&B and sat on the windowsill tapping feebly at the glass. Nerlin opened the window and lifted the soggy, exhausted bird inside.
‘Are you Vessel or Parsnip?’ said the Queen.
‘Snip-Snip,’ said Parsnip. ‘Wessel lost, gone bye bye.’
‘Not dead?’ cried the Queen. ‘Not my beloved Vessel, my one true love, cut off in his prime at a mere hundred and twenty years of age, a star that shone so brightly in this sad world of ours, now turned into a black hole lost in the mists of time, my genius and protector gone from my life forever, leaving us all alone and desolate to fend for ourselves and our children and our children’s children without his magic, his mystery, his dark sombre voice and his exceptionally well-fitting tights?’
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘Wessel not dead, him twapped in urnchanted cagey wire thing by worse hisperer,’ said Parsnip.
‘Oh no,’ cried the Queen.
‘Right,’ said Mordonna, taking charge. ‘We must get out of here immediately. With a bit of luck we’ve got a few hours’ start and should be able to get away.’
‘I will stay,’ said the Queen, ‘in case my true love, my only …’
‘No you won’t. You’ll do as you’re told and come with us,’ Mordonna ordered. ‘I’m going to have another baby fairly soon, you know, so I’d like to get settled into somewhere safe. We can look for Vessel later.’
So they took a cab to the station, a train to another city, another cab to a different station, another train to a third city, walked across the road, got on a bus to yet another station, and went to a fourth city that was not so much a city as a large town.
Just to make doubly sure they would not be followed, they covered their tracks with garlic powder then walked backwards to another station where they took the fifteenth train to a town that was so ugly no one would ever think they would choose to live there, even if they were playing a double-triple-quadruple-bluff. Then they bought a street map.
‘Right, let’s have a look,’ said Mordonna, unfolding the map. ‘We need a nice anonymous street … Wow, I don’t believe it.’
‘What?’
‘Which plant scares wizards more than any other?’
‘Deadly nightshade?’ said Nerlin.
‘No, that’s their favourite. Which one is the opposite?’
‘White roses?’
‘Worse.’
‘Not the “A” plant?’
‘Exactly. Acacias,’ said Mordonna, crossing her fingers for protection.42 ‘You’ll never believe this but there’s a street in this town called Acacia Avenue.’
‘See, I told you humans were stupid,’ said the Queen.
‘Yes, we all know that,’ said Mordonna, ‘but if we bought a house in Acacia Avenue, it would be the last place the King’s spies would ever look for us.’
‘But wouldn’t we all burst out in huge warty boils and die horribly if we went to live there?’ said Nerlin.
‘Of course not,’ said Mordonna, pretending to be brave. ‘That’s just an old wives tale.’
‘I’m an old wife,’ said the Queen. ‘And I believe it.’
But Mordonna insisted, and to prove it was all silly superstition she made Parsnip fly down Acacia Avenue and back. Then she walked down the street herself and then she walked down it again taking her two children with her. Finally, she made Nerlin and the Queen walk down it.
‘And,’ she said, when the others had reluctantly agreed she might be right, ‘did you notice that there was a For Sale sign on one of the houses?’
‘No,’ said Nerlin, the Queen, Valla and Satanella all at once. ‘I had my eyes shut.’
‘And how’s this for a good omen?’ Mordonna went on. ‘It’s the luckiest number in the world, number thirteen.’
So they drew straws and the loser went and got the estate agent. The Queen paid for the house with the King’s gold, and they moved in to their new home.
‘It would be good if we could get all the furniture sorted out first,’ said Mordonna to Nerlin as they walked through the empty house, ‘because I’d like to have another baby very soon.’
As the whole family were witches and wizards, they didn’t have to bother with all the usual shopping stuff.43 All they had to do was concentrate on what they wanted and do a few spells with Mordonna’s wand.
The Queen, who was reduced to using her second-best wand since the accident in Tristan da Cunha, was still too upset at losing Vessel to concentrate. After she filled the lounge room with crocodiles instead of comfy chairs, she was only allowed to get smaller household items like the kettle and toothbrushes.44
Remembering what the Sheman had said about having seven children, Nerlin was given the job of adding more space to the house.
So as not to arouse suspicion with the neighbours when a whole lot of new rooms suddenly appeared, he hid three rooms in the attic and created some more underground, including lots of cellars where each member of the family could enjoy their own special hobbies or experiments to their heart’s content. It was only when he had dug down so far that he could fry an egg on the floor using the heat at the centre of the earth that he decided it was time to stop.
About five minutes after the Floods finished furnishing the house, the most incredible thunderstorm started. At first they thought the Hearse Whisperer had somehow managed to track them down, but it was just a coincidence.
Parsnip had always been a big
fan of thunderstorms, especially lightning, so he decided to fly up to the tallest chimney and become a lightning conductor.
‘Ven Wessel back is, me be bird again,’ he said and flew out into the rain to conduct the storm.
By the time Mordonna was ready to have her third baby, Parsnip had reached the fifth movement of his storm symphony and the thunder was exploding wonderfully through the black clouds. The crow raised his baton and massive bolts of lightning raced round and round number thirteen Acacia Avenue. Enough electricity to power the whole of New York for seventeen months shot through the bedroom window at the very moment the baby was born.
And in that instant all the lightning vanished.
And Mordonna got a huge shock.
Actually she got two huge shocks, and they were both from the baby. The first one was a huge electric shock and the second was a huge shock to her eyes. The baby was covered from head to foot in wiry hair. Even the palms of its hands and in between its toes were hairy and every hair was crackling with the lightning it had absorbed. In the darkness caused by a power cut, the baby’s eyes sparkled like two light bulbs.
‘All that lightning,’ said the Queen. ‘Is it dead?’
‘Far from it,’ said Mordonna. ‘It’s got a huge grin on its face.’
While the baby touched the brass bed with its fingers, making it glow and hover around the room, the Queen brought Mordonna a pair of heavy lead gloves so she could hold her new baby.
‘If it’s a girl, let’s call it Mary,’ she said dreamily.
‘If it’s a boy, we should name it after my most famous ancestor, Merlin,’ Nerlin said.
They both peered closely at the baby, but couldn’t find any clues to what it was. All their attempts to find out ended up with everyone getting an electric shock, even when they used a pair of rubber gloves and some barbecue tongs. In the end they decided that it didn’t really matter.
‘Well, Merlinmary it is,’ Mordonna said brightly. ‘I wonder what you feed an electric baby.’
‘Bat trees, bat trees,’ Merlinmary said. ‘Me want bat trees.’
So they brought her bats but she just electrocuted them. They tried her with blood and everything else they had in the kitchen, but Merlinmary didn’t like any of them.
‘If I remember rightly,’ said the Queen, ‘I had a distant cousin three times removed – Binky Frankenstein – and she had the same problem. I think they fed her batteries.’
‘Bat trees!’ Merlinmary repeated.
She stuck her fingers in the electric socket45 and all the lights in Acacia Avenue went out.
‘Maybe you should just use one finger next time,’ Mordonna suggested.
Despite the late-night happy sounds of Valla sucking blood, Satanella yapping and Merlinmary buzzing quietly, the Queen couldn’t settle down. She spent all night every night pacing up and down on the back verandah. If you did this for several nights, you would look dreadful. With the Queen it was difficult to see any difference.
‘Mother, you look like death warmed up,’ Mordonna said. ‘Actually, no, you always look like that. Now you look like death gone cold. But you shouldn’t give up hope. I’m sure you’ll see Vessel again.’
‘That’s easy for you to say, but together we’re hundreds of years old already! How long do you suggest I wait before giving up hope?’
‘Maybe we could send Parsnip to look for him,’ Nerlin suggested.
‘If we do that it could alert the Hearse Whisperer to where we are,’ said the Queen. ‘No, I’ve made a decision. I want to be buried in the back garden. If my sweetheart ever comes back, you can dig me up again.’
If you are a witch and you get buried in a coffin, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re dead. It just means you’ve decided to stop being alive for a while, which is not the same thing. So Nerlin went down into his cellar and made the old lady a comfy coffin with a TV and an internit connection46 and a funnel for rat-tail soup – a special recipe from Tristan Da Cunha. Because she was one of those frantic little dogs that loves to dig, Satanella spent the next three days making a huge hole in the back garden.
When it was ready, Nerlin lowered the coffin into place. The Queen put on a clean shroud, got a copy of the latest TV guide and a nice embroidered cushion saying ‘Death Is Not A Rehearsal’, and climbed in.
Nerlin screwed down the lid, connected the TV to the power and plugged in the soup funnel. Then Satanella scraped all the earth back over the coffin. Mordonna patted it down with a spade and planted a nice group of funeral lilies round the edge.
The Queen admitted to herself that she was too old to go gallivanting around any more and that long afternoons in the airless gloom of a comfy coffin watching old black and white movies on TV and being slowly eaten away by maggots would actually be rather nice.
‘If you hear anything about my beloved Vessel,’ she shouted through the funnel, ‘just send me a fleamail over the nit.’
Over the next few weeks the Floods settled in to their new home. The Hearse Whisperer searched backwards and forwards, up and down, sideways and in a wiggly spiral trying to find the family, but with no luck. Rather than admit they had eluded her, she convinced herself that they had left the country, so she left the country too. If only the Floods had known this, they could have sent Parsnip off to find Vessel and bring him back.
Leach, being a homing vulture, had no trouble finding them – although he had almost been persuaded to stay in Patagonia by a very attractive condor that had fluttered her throat at him and fed him dainty morsels of festering meat. The Flood family thought the sight of a huge ugly old bird flapping around Acacia Avenue might be too much for the locals, though, so Leach agreed to go and look for Vessel.
‘It’s either that, or I could turn you into a budgie,’ telepathed Mordonna.
‘Tough choice,’ Leach telepathed back. ‘Fly through endless rain and storms and blizzards into the unknown or become a cute little blue thing sitting in a cage eating disgusting cuttlefish and asking everyone who’s a pretty boy then. I’ll see you later.’
And he flew off in the totally wrong direction, which would probably become the right direction – eventually.
‘You know, Nerlin, my darling,’ Mordonna said as they watched their three children racing around the house, ‘the Sheman may have said seven children, but after one of the last two being turned into a dog because a prawn was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the other being struck by lightning, I think we might make the other four with a book of spells and a selection of common household ingredients.’
Winchflat Flood mostly created himself. Mordonna bought a packet of freeze-dried wizpoles47 by mail-order from Transylvania Waters, being careful to use a false name on the order form. Nerlin took one wizpole down into the cellars and put it into a tank of special hatching brew, which he made from an ancient recipe his grandmother had tattooed on the underneath of his tongue.
What should have happened then is that the wizpole should have slowly grown into a baby wizard by growing arms and legs and learning to breathe air. What actually happened was that Nerlin dropped a minute scrap of bacon from a sandwich he’d been eating into the tank and it joined with the wizpole and slowly began to mutate.
Time passed and, as it did so, a tiny innocent worm tunnelled down from the back garden until it fell through a gap in the cellar roof and landed in the tank. By then Winchflat had grown his arms and legs and he swam over to the worm and swallowed it. At that very moment the brightest full moon of the century rose over Acacia Avenue and sent a tiny beam of light right down the tunnel the worm had made. As the light moved towards the cellar, it was magnified by minute specks of quartz in the earth, so that when it burst into the cellar it was as strong as a five-megawatt laser. It hit Winchflat right on the back of the head and transferred all its power into his brain.
I think, therefore I am, Winchflat thought and immediately grew eyes, a nose, giant ears and extra fingers and toes.
I am a ladder, he thought, the L
ord of the Rungs, and he climbed out of the tank.
Finally he thought, I am Winchflat Flood, the Lord of the Things, which was right, because Winchflat was to be the family genius who would invent and build many wonderful things such as the Solid Photocopier that could clone living beings, and the fantastic Seethebackofyourheadascope, which one day would turn him into a multi-millionaire.
But Winchflat’s genius alone was not enough. Without the final incredible event in the series of coincidences that had created him, he would have starved to death, because tiny babies, even ones as incredibly brilliant as Winchflat turned out to be, cannot reach door handles. By a mega-double-incredible coincidence, Mordonna went down to that particular cellar to store a piece of washed-rind cheese that was so smelly that even when it was buried in concrete inside a steel safe, it made your eyes water for a week.
‘I thought I was going to have another baby,’ she said when she saw her newly created son. ‘Who’s a clever boy then?’
‘I am, Mummy,’ said Winchflat. He proceeded to recite his eighteen times table in seven hundred languages, none of which was Belgian.48
‘Well, four down, three to go,’ said Nerlin when Mordonna arrived in the kitchen with their new baby.
‘I was thinking,’ said Mordonna, ‘maybe we could have twins or even triplets and get the whole seven-baby prediction out of the way in one go.’
So baby Winchflat designed his first invention, using assorted plastic bottles, PVC pipes from the building site down the road, six toilet roll tubes, an experimental nuclear power plant, some chemicals, a set of Jamie Oliver saucepans and a dash of Worcestershire Sauce. They tried to construct the machine in the cellar where Winchflat had been created, but the washed-rind cheese had mutated into a chartered accountant who wouldn’t let them into the room because he still smelled like old mouldy socks and was very embarrassed.
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