Floods 12

by Colin Thompson

  About the Book

  Everyone gets old, even witches and wizards. Their backs get stiff. Their feet get sore, and their brains go and live far, far away.

  Not even Nerlin Flood, the King of Transylvania Waters, is immune to the curse of old age. The rest of the family have noticed that Nerlin is slipping into total Doolallyness – he even has an invisible friend called Geoffrey-Geoffrey, who warns him not to eat broccoli because it will give him global warming.

  Will the Old Crones be able to cure him, or is King Nerlin doomed to spend his twilight years talking to the wall, wearing a crooked jacket* and incompetence pants?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  A Few Amazing Encyclopedias

  Popular Treatments from The Crones’ Book of Medicine

  Two Castle Twilight Speciality Chefs

  Some Transylvania Waters Lullabies

  Have You Seen This Book?

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  Diedication:

  For all the

  Doolallies of

  this world*

  Prologue

  Since The Floods 11 our hero Nigel Davenport, 39½, has grown a fourth ear on a damp flannel in a jam jar. His other three ears have moved into the jam jar, as they realised it was more exciting there than anywhere on Nigel’s body. Of course, this means that Nigel is now totally deaf.

  This has two consequences, one bad and one good. The bad one is that he can no longer hear his stunningly gruesome lumpy-skinned seventh wife, Gladys Ferzackerly, when she orders him about. Actually this is a good thing for both of them – for Nigel because he can’t hear her constant nagging, and for Gladys because she has never been married to anyone before who didn’t keep answering back to her. Another good thing is that it means she hasn’t eaten him, like she had her previous seven husbands.

  Meanwhile, back in Surreyshire-On-Toast, Nigel’s dead mother, Ironica, has been dug up and kidnapped by secret-secret-secret-secret agents from a wholefood supermarket to be recycled into a delicious organic soup once they have rinsed all the maggots out of her brain.

  The future is looking wonderful for Jolyon Whipsnade-Throgmorton, though. Whilst in hospital having a bad infestation of thistle prickles removed from very rude parts of his body, he and the matron, Edith Armature-Tonsil, met and fell in love. They now live in a large wardrobe in the beautiful Scottish Firth of Fifthshire. They are planning to breed something or other, though they can’t decide what.

  WILL Nigel ever hear again?

  WILL Gladys EVER stop nagging and knitting toilet-seat covers out of barbed wire?

  WILL Jolyon and Edith ever be able to domesticate the Wild Scottish Sporran?

  All will be revealed in a very dark room with the lights turned off and under plain wrapper.

  But will the wrapper ever make a hit record? Who cares, read this book instead.

  ‘I can’t find my socks!’

  It was the middle of the night and all through the castle not a creature was stirring, not even a rascal.1 Nothing, that was, except Nerlin, who was sitting bolt upright in the darkness in a confused panic.

  ‘I can’t find my socks and I’ve gone blind,’ he cried.

  Mordonna, who had been fast asleep beside him, sat up. ‘Sweetheart,’ she said, turning on the light, ‘you haven’t gone blind. It’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘But I’ve lost my socks,’ Nerlin cried.

  ‘They’re on your feet,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Oh,’ said Nerlin, lying down again.

  Mordonna turned off the light and tried to go back to sleep, but five minutes later, just as she was nodding off …

  ‘I’ve lost my feet!’

  ‘They’re on the ends of your legs,’ Mordonna mumbled.

  ‘But it’s dark. I can’t find them.’

  ‘Do you know where your socks are?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Yes, of course I do. They’re at the bottom of the bed.’

  ‘Right. Now reach down and touch them. What can you feel?’

  ‘Feet,’ said Nerlin. ‘Horrible, cold, clammy feet.’

  ‘Those are your feet.’

  ‘How can you be so sure of that?’ said Nerlin. ‘It’s dark. They don’t feel like my feet. I think some subversive revolutionaries might have kidnapped my feet and left these in their place.’

  ‘There are no subversive revolutionaries in Transylvania Waters,’ said Mordonna. ‘Everybody loves you.’

  ‘The Plank doesn’t,’ said Nerlin. ‘The Plank wants to turn Transylvania Waters into a republic.’

  The Plank, or to use his real name, Bert Scroggins, was Transylvania Waters’s only property developer. Because everyone thought that things were pretty well perfect as they were, no one actually wanted anything to change. So far, the only property that Bert Scroggins had developed involved replacing a narrow plank across a ditch three miles out of town with a much wider plank and a sign that said This plank has been placed here for your convenience by the Scroggins Development Corporation. This was how he had got his nickname. The Plank was not a happy man, but he continued to submit development plans to the Transylvania Waters Development Committee in the hope that they would at least agree to one of his schemes. This was unlikely, as there was no such thing as the Transylvania Waters Development Committee and all his letters were recycled by the Transylvania Waters Department of Recycling, which was actually a goat called Jock.

  ‘No, darling. I’ve told you this already,’ said Mordonna. ‘The Plank wants to turn the old Transylvania Waters gasworks into a pub.’

  ‘Oh. Well, those aren’t my feet down there in my socks,’ said Nerlin. ‘In fact, they’re not even my socks. They are revolutionary socks fitted with bugging devices and they are transmitting every single word we say.’

  ‘And we’ve been through that before, haven’t we?’ said Mordonna. ‘Can you remember what I told you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I told you that our very clever son, Winchflat, had fitted all your socks with noise-cancelling elastic. Remember?’

  Of course Nerlin didn’t remember. There were days when he couldn’t even remember his own name and insisted he was an eight-year-old girl called Mary. Fortunately, this was not one of those days, but he still insisted his feet belonged to someone else.

  ‘Oh yes, and whose feet are they, then?’ Mordonna asked.

  ‘Geoffrey-Geoffrey’s.’

  Oh no, thought Mordonna, not Geoffrey-Geoffrey again.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘So if you’ve got Geoffrey-Geoffrey’s feet, then I expect he’s got yours. Now that we know where everyone’s feet are, can we please go back to sleep?’

  Geoffrey-Geoffrey was Nerlin’s new imaginary friend – not new in the I-used-to-have-an-old-imaginary-friend-and-now-I’ve-got-a-new-one kind of way, but because this was Nerlin’s only imaginary friend. Geoffrey-Geoffrey was new because he had only arrived a few weeks ago after a very heavy marble gargoyle had fallen off a tower in Castle Twilight and bounced off Nerlin’s head.2

  Night-times were becoming more and more like this as Nerlin’s mind slowly wandered off to Planet Janet, a lovely happy place where
the grass is as blue as the sky, which in Planet Janet is actually pink like sugar candy, and it always feels like spring and the sun shines every single day, except when there’s wonderful bright new snow to play in, and your knees, which used to be so knobbly that you won competitions with them, are now as smooth as a princess’s cheeks, except when you lose your socks or your feet or your marbles or something.3

  And the daytimes were becoming more like this too.

  If only my darling husband hadn’t refused to eat his broccoli, Mordonna said to herself, his brain would be as sharp as ever.

  ‘Geoffrey-Geoffrey says broccoli is bad for you,’ said Nerlin, who had discovered that as he lost the ability to read his own mind, he was developing the ability to read the minds of those around him. ‘He says it gives you global warming.’

  So she could actually get enough sleep each day, Mordonna had got Nerlin a new special servant.

  Bacstairs had been one of Castle Twilight’s gardeners, the inventor of the black marigold, which was Transylvania Waters’s most popular flower. It was used for weddings and funerals and as a local anaesthetic – a true flower for every occasion. Nerlin and Bacstairs oft en met each other as the king wandered around the garden and they seemed to get on very well, so he was the obvious choice when Mordonna decided Nerlin needed his own personal manservant.

  ‘The trick is,’ said Dr Charles A’tan, Transylvania Waters’s top psychiatrist,4 ‘that when someone goes gaga – or, as we professionals say, Doolally – to provide them with a special caretaker who is more out of it than the patient. That way, the patient thinks they are actually perfectly OK when, in fact, they are barking mad.’

  Mordonna wasn’t convinced of the doctor’s train of thought, but she had to admit that Bacstairs was the perfect candidate for the job. Bacstairs adored King Nerlin and thought of him as a living god.

  ‘My lord,’ he said, as he gently removed sixteen daisies from Nerlin’s nose with a pair of tweezers,5 ‘I have lost count of the number of times I have dreamed of being your loyal manservant, not once believing it would ever happen.’

  ‘Fourteen,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘Fourteen?’ said Bacstairs.

  ‘Yes. That’s how many times you dreamt of being my whatever it is you just said,’ Nerlin explained.

  Counting was not a gift Bacstairs had been blessed with. So he hadn’t so much lost count as never been able to do it in the first place. Unsurprisingly, he was deeply impressed when his master told him it had been fourteen times, even though the actual figure was close to several thousand.

  After Bacstairs had invented the black marigold and totally failed to invent the black rose, his life had never been so exciting again and he found himself thinking cruel and resentful thoughts about innocent things like marigolds and buttercups. So he was only too happy to get out of the garden and spend the rest of his life without Transylvania Waters’s earth under his fingernails.6

  Bacstairs slept in a box outside the royal bedchamber, ready to take care of his beloved lord and master at a moment’s notice. It was a very special box, the sort of box that many people dream of sleeping in. Mordonna was beginning to think it would only be a matter of time before Nerlin would have to sleep in a box of his own outside the royal bedchamber so she could get a decent night’s sleep.

  Mordonna had tried putting Nerlin to bed in one of the grandchildren’s nurseries, now that the children had moved on to more grown-up bedrooms.

  At first Nerlin had been delighted. There were pretty black witches on broomsticks hanging from the ceiling and they glowed in the dark with a comforting blue light. There were luminous stars and planets and skulls on the ceiling too, and the scent of Friar’s Balsam7 in the air, and the bed had special creaking bones and groaning noises made by a little machine that Winchflat had created for his beloved daughter, Princess Transistor.

  But then, Nerlin, who had slept in a huge bed beside his beloved wife for as long as he could remember and quite a few years more than that, had turned over in the new much narrower bed and fallen on the floor. This had made him call for the castle guards to search for the burglars who had had stolen half the bed.

  ‘And I landed on top of Geoffrey-Geoffrey and he got a great big bruise,’ said Nerlin.

  So now Nerlin was back in the royal bedchamber again.

  ‘We have to do something about your father,’ said Mordonna.

  She had gathered the children together in her study, while Bacstairs had taken Nerlin for a walk down to Lake Tarnish to play with the frogspawn.

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Betty. ‘He seems happier than he’s ever been.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but he’s losing his grip on reality,’ said Mordonna. ‘Dr A’tan says he is well on his way to becoming totally Doolally.’

  ‘Do what?’ said Merlinmary.

  ‘Doolally,’ said Valla. ‘It means “away with the fairies”.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mordonna agreed, ‘except that in your father’s case, I tried that, but the fairies refused to take him.’

  ‘But he’s happy,’ Betty insisted. ‘Isn’t that the most important thing? I mean, what’s wrong with having an invisible friend and talking to flowers? We’ve all done that, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yes, maybe,’ said Merlinmary, and everyone else nodded. ‘But they don’t reply, do they?’

  Betty said nothing and did her best to hide her look of surprise. She had several invisible friends and they all replied. She once had an invisible friend called Sultana-Bread, who never stopped talking, and the only way Betty finally managed to shut her up was by eating her.8

  The other children agreed with Betty. They loved their father, and so what if he did say hello to the grass and the trees every day? It didn’t bother anyone.

  ‘It’s not as if he actually runs the country,’ said Valla. ‘Mother, we all know he’s never been the sharpest knife in the box, and that you’ve looked after everything.’

  ‘But …’ Mordonna began.

  She tried to explain that Nerlin’s Doolallyness was ruining her sleep. ‘I mean, it’s like someone snoring, only worse,’ she said. ‘And I’m tired all the time.’

  ‘Well, maybe I can come up with an invention,’ said Winchflat. ‘A special hat or something.’

  ‘Who for?’ said Mordonna. ‘Me or him?’

  ‘Maybe you could have matching his and hers hats,’ said Betty, who was becoming very fashion-conscious as she grew older.

  ‘I don’t see how a hat’s going to help, unless I roll it up and stuff it in your father’s mouth to keep him quiet,’ Mordonna snapped. Tiredness was making her short-tempered.

  ‘I’m thinking like those headphones you wear that cut out all the noise around you,’ Winchflat explained. ‘But I’m assuming, Mother, that you don’t want to wear headphones in bed every night.’

  ‘You are always so considerate,’ said Mordonna. ‘You’re absolutely right. Just imagine what big lumpy headphones would do to my hair.’

  Winchflat was about to say that he hadn’t actually thought about his mother’s hair, but more the idea that sleeping with them pushing into the side of one’s head all night meant they’d probably slide off. Instead he just nodded. It never did any harm to have Mordonna think you were totally wonderful and caring.

  ‘You would pull the lovely, soft, knitted hat down over your ears – a hat, I might add, that would be designed to enhance your hair and ensure its perfect flatness – and you would firmly but gently press the “on” button and be instantly surrounded by complete silence,’ Winchflat said.

  ‘That sounds perfect,’ said Mordonna. ‘Except for one thing.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘If your father had an attack of severe Doolallyness in the middle of the night and I couldn’t hear him calling out to me, he’d just start shaking me until I woke up.’

  ‘Well, of course he would,’ Winchflat replied in a flash. ‘That’s why there are two parts to the wonderful Hat of Silence. You would wear the lovely hat,
while Father would be pinned to the bed with iron chains, shackles and big lumps of lead.’

  Although Nerlin’s collapsing brainpower was spoiling the wonderful calmness of her life and sleep, Mordonna loved Nerlin no less than she had the day they had met. So the idea of chaining him down wasn’t an option she fancied.

  ‘There must be something else we can do,’ she said.

  ‘What about the Old Crones?’ said Valla. ‘They reckon they can cure anything. They did wonders for me when I got the flu.’

  ‘They cured it?’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Goodness me, no,’ said Valla. ‘They developed it into full-blown bubonic plague. It was wonderful.’

  ‘When I got the flu,’ said Satanella, ‘the Old Crones didn’t give me the plague. All I got was mange and a bottle of smelly shampoo.’

  ‘At least shampoo’s better than real poo,’ said Merlinmary.

  ‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? You’re not a dog,’ said Satanella.

  ‘Do you remember, Mother, when we came back here and reclaimed the throne?’ Valla asked. ‘Quenelle the Old Crone gave us shelter in her cave for the night.’9

  ‘Indeed I do,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Well, she is the top crone,’ Valla explained. ‘She’s the one the other Old Crones go to when they are unwell.’

  ‘And her bacon sandwiches were among the finest I have ever tasted,’ said Mordonna, who was something of an expert in the bacon department.

  So it was agreed that before Winchflat created any gadgets, even soft fluffy ones with no padlocks, gags or pointy bits at all, they would take Nerlin up into the mountains to visit Quenelle, Queen of the Old Crones.