‘We can even make them visible,’ said Dispepsya.
‘Ooh, I’m not sure about that,’ said Nerlin. ‘I mean, if I saw what Geoffrey-Geoffrey looked like in real life rather than how I see him now, I might not like him. And I’m not sure I want Dorothy to have an invisible friend. He might want to spend all his time with them instead of me.’
‘That’s true,’ said Quenelle. ‘So why don’t we just give him the power of speech and forget about the invisible friends bit?’
‘You know how much you and Dorothy love it when you push him round in that toy truck?’ added Mordonna. ‘Well, if Dorothy could speak, you could play toy trains together and Dorothy could be the engine driver.’
‘Brilliant!’ said Nerlin, and reached into his pocket for the sleeping rat.
Except the rat wasn’t sleeping. And although no one knew it but the Old Crones suspected it, Dorothy was not actually a rat, and he had been listening to every word of their conversation.
As Nerlin’s open hand approached, Dorothy lunged forward and sank his teeth into it. Nerlin screamed in pain and pulled his hand out with Dorothy still attached to it. Once out in the open the rat let go, but the Old Crones were ready and, before the creature could escape, they threw him into a small cage and locked it.
‘You are so going to regret that,’ said Dorothy in a weird, evil clockwork-like voice that was far too big to have come out of a medium-sized rat.
‘I’ve just been checking on the net,’ said Winchflat, coming into the cave, ‘and there’s no such creature as a Tristan da Cunha Clucking Rat.’
‘Yes there is,’ Dorothy growled. ‘I’m one.’
‘No you’re not,’ said Winchflat. ‘The only rat I can find on Tristan da Cunha is the Clicking Rat.’
‘Clicking rat, clucking rat,’ Dorothy snapped. ‘What’s the difference? I’m one of them.’
‘And,’ Winchflat continued, ‘they became extinct fifteen hundred years ago and there are no records of them having been able to speak.’
‘No, yes, but that’s not strictly true,’ Dorothy blustered. ‘Extinct on the main island, but there is a small colony of us still living on Inaccessible Island. Um, er, that’s why I changed Nerlin’s tongue map to there, to remind me of home.’
Dorothy tried to bluff his way out of the situation with no success. He could explain neither why nor how he had left the incredibly remote island and ended up living in Nerlin’s hat.
‘I was kidnapped by a seagull,’ he said, which no one believed for a second.
‘I signed on as a cabin boy and finally jumped ship,’ he tried. This was even more unbelievable.
‘I got stuck in a bottle that had washed up on the beach and then got carried away on the next high tide and over a year later, during which time I had had nothing to eat but plankton and krill, I came ashore in France, where the bottle was found by a bottle collector who couldn’t see me inside because of all the green slime that had grown there and when he poked his finger into the bottle and I bit it, he screamed in pain and dropped the bottle on the floor where it shattered, allowing me to escape and jump onto a passing truck on its way to Switzerland, where I was grabbed by a golden eagle who flew here and dropped me in her nest for her children to eat, but I managed to bite both her children before they could bite me and I scrambled down the rocks to safety, which happened to be the back garden of Castle Twilight, where I met King Nerlin,’ he said finally.
But no one believed that either, though it was completely true apart from the bits that weren’t.
It was agreed that while Dispepsya took Nerlin to visit Gruinard, Winchflat would take Dorothy back to the castle to try and find out exactly what the creature was.
‘I will put its brain in my Brain-Washing-Machine and see what we can filter out of the dirty water,’ Winchflat said.
This threat finally got through to Dorothy, who began to shake and whimper.
‘OK, I’ll tell you the truth,’ he said. ‘My real name is Dorlock.’
‘Yes,’ said Quenelle. ‘Go on.’
‘Go on what?’ said Dorlock.
‘You said you were going to tell us the truth,’ said Quenelle. ‘So get on with it.’
‘I just did,’ said the rat. ‘My name is Dorlock.’
‘And the rest?’
‘What rest?’
‘The truth,’ Quenelle said, and turned to Anorexya. ‘If we put the rat in this cage and then place it in a very tall bucket of water, do you think it would sink or float?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Anorexya. ‘Let’s find out.’
Dorlock wet himself and shivered pathetically.30
‘Take him away,’ said Quenelle to Winchflat.
The next morning, after lots of bacon and a few token green things followed by a good night’s sleep and some bacon, everyone got ready to go back down to Castle Twilight. Everyone except Dispepsya and Nerlin, who had to travel even higher into the mountains to visit the legendary Virus Witch Gruinard and her Seven Acolytes, who were like trainee Old Crones in that they were neither old nor crones, but made the tea and did the washing up.
‘Come on, Your Majesty,’ said Dispepsya. ‘We must be on our way if we are to reach our destination before nightfall. We have many miles and quite a few kilometres to travel.’
‘I’ll tell Geoffrey-Geoffrey to get ready,’ said Nerlin.
‘Oh no, Your Majesty,’ said Dispepsya. ‘I’m afraid no invisible friends can come with us.’
‘But …’ Nerlin began.
‘No, sire, it would end in tears,’ Dispepsya explained. ‘Gruinard hates almost everything in the whole world, but the one thing she hates more than anything else, apart from Vegemite, of course, are invisible friends. Were Geoffrey-Geoffrey to come with us, he would actually become visible for a few agonising moments as Gruinard engulfed him in a ball of flames.’
Nerlin said that he wasn’t sure he actually wanted to meet Gruinard and, just in case there was to be any flame-engulfing, he changed into a pair of flame-proof underpants, which made a really annoying creaking noise for the rest of their trip. It was so annoying that Dispepsya found herself wishing that her beloved King would drop dead.
‘I am leaving my own invisible friend here,’ said Dispepsya. ‘In fact, Fifi-Fifi can keep Geoffrey-Geoffrey company while we are away.’
That made Nerlin feel a bit better. He was about to say, ‘Supposing Geoffrey-Geoffrey and Fifi-Fifi fell in love with each other and wouldn’t want to have anything to do with us anymore?’ when Dispepsya said:
‘Maybe they will fall in love with each other and have lots of wonderful, invisible babies. After all, Fifi-Fifi is incredibly beautiful and I’m sure Geoffrey-Geoffrey is incredibly handsome, so if they did have children they would be so incredibly, incredibly beautiful that mere visibles like us would be struck blind if we looked at them and we would sort of be the proud grandparents.’
Part of Nerlin wanted to tell Dispepsya that she was a complete fruit loop, but another part – the bit with the virus infection – thought that the invisible babies sounded wonderful and was happy to leave Geoffrey-Geoffrey behind.
You might be a king, Dispepsya said to herself, but you are such a twit.
Beyond the Old Crones’ caves the path got much narrower. So they wouldn’t fall off the mountain, they had been forced to choose the two skinniest donkeys they could find. Naturally, these were also the two oldest donkeys, and so progress was slow.
They climbed up to another small valley where the clouds had decided it was a good place to have a rest. This meant that the group could barely see a thing – apart from lots of cloud, that is. Their only option was to rely on the two donkeys to follow the right path, which was a really rubbish option because neither of the donkeys had ever been there before and, on account of their old age, had really bad eyesight.
‘I’ve never been here before,’ said the first donkey. ‘Are we going the right way?’
‘On the other hand,’ said the second donke
y, who had a bit of a sense of humour, ‘I’ve never been here before either. So why are you asking me?’
‘I wasn’t. I was asking the old lady.’
‘Listen, donkey, enough of the “old lady”, if you don’t mind,’ said Dispepsya.
‘Yeah, OK,’ said the first donkey. ‘Considering we could well fall to our death at any moment, I don’t think calling you old is anything to worry about.’
‘Look at it this way,’ said Nerlin, ‘can’t you see more than one path?’
‘No,’ said both donkeys.
‘This would have to be the right one then, wouldn’t it?’
‘By “no”, I meant no I can’t see any path,’ said the first donkey.
‘What she said,’ said the second donkey.
‘I think it might be better if we went on by foot,’ said Nerlin.
‘Whose foot?’ said one of the donkeys.
‘Our own,’ Nerlin replied.
‘Please yourself,’ said the donkeys. ‘We’ll just wait here for you then.’
‘Halt, who goes there?’ said a voice from somewhere in the clouds.
‘We do,’ said Dispepsya.
‘I know that voice,’ said Nerlin.
‘I know that voice,’ said the voice.
‘I know those voices,’ said a second voice from another part of the cloud.
‘What are you two doing here?’ said a third voice from a completely different bit of the cloud.
After a lot of banging, crashing, tripping over and cursing, the three Fake Cooks appeared.
‘How did you get here ahead of us?’ said Dispepsya at exactly the same time the three Fake Cooks said, ‘Why did you two come up that way?’
‘We were wondering about that,’ said the two old donkeys.
‘We took the shortcut,’ said one of the Fake Cooks.
‘Shortcut?’ said Dispepsya. ‘What shortcut?’
After wasting a lot more time, the two donkeys were finally sent back down the shortcut and very soon discovered why it was called a shortcut on account of the fact it was so slippery and steep that they fell off the mountain, which cut their lives short.
The three Fake Cooks, who actually had a printout off Gargle Maps31 and a proper human GPS,32 led Nerlin and Dispepsya through the clouds and up another path that eventually took them above the cloud line.
The whole place was like a magical world, which, being part of Transylvania Waters, it was. But it was even more magical. The clouds that they had just climbed through were not the sort of clouds that moved about or leaked water over everyone underneath them. They were Masking Clouds, which float above places that are completely secret from the rest of the world. This is why no one has ever seen an aerial photo of Quicklime College, the wizard school in Patagonia. The entire valley is hidden beneath Masking Clouds.
From where they stood, Nerlin and Dispepsya looked out across the tops of the clouds as if they were floating in a big bed of cotton wool. Above them, another Masking Cloud kept them hidden from satellites and cameras floating above the world. This cloud was thick enough to hide them, but thin enough to let the sun’s warm glow shine over everything so that it coated the valley with a golden sheen. This was a place that could only be described as perfect.
‘We’ll leave you now,’ said the Fake Cooks. ‘We’re not really supposed to be up here. Just walk along to the other end of the valley and you’ll find Gruinard’s house by the Impossible Waterfall.’
‘The Impossible Waterfall?’ said Nerlin. ‘What’s that?’
‘You’ll see.’
Nerlin watched them disappear down the footpath, which seemed to close behind them.
‘You could become enchanted by this place,’ he said, ‘and never want to leave.’
‘That’s why no one’s allowed up here,’ Dispepsya explained.
‘But we’re here.’
‘Yes, but Quenelle emailed ahead. We’re expected.’
Dispepsya and Nerlin turned and walked along beside the stream, which sparkled and danced like streams do in fairy stories. In fact, it wasn’t so much a stream as a babbling brook with brightly coloured kingfishers diving into the water, where beautiful vibrant fish darted among the waving leaves of underwater grasses. It was nature at her most magnificent, apart from the bit at the end when the kingfishers killed the fish and ate them.
‘Those poor little fish,’ said Dispepsya.
‘Sod off, lady,’ said one of the kingfishers. ‘That’s my lunch you’re talking about, and yes, they do taste as wonderful as they look.’
They soon discovered that every living thing in the valley could talk, including the fish, though being underwater it was impossible to understand them.
‘I wonder what they’re saying,’ said Dispepsya.
‘“Oww” and “ouch”, mainly,’ said the kingfisher, swooping down for another mouthful.
To their left was a lush meadow full of bright grass and wonderful wildflowers. Here and there, fat happy cows slowly ate their way back to Quenelle’s cottage to be milked.
‘I feel better already,’ said Nerlin. ‘Just being here has lift ed my spirits. It’s as if I’ve had my head in a paper bag and now it’s been taken off.’
They rounded a corner and there was Quenelle’s cottage.
The word ‘cottage’ usually describes somewhere quite small with a thatched roof and roses climbing up the walls, with the whole thing set in a quaint English garden full of delphiniums and dahlias and seventeen other types of flowers all beginning with the letter ‘d’.
Quenelle’s cottage was exactly like that, except it was very big, was four storeys high and had an attic. True, the roof was thatched, though not with dead reeds but living bushes, long grass and a herd of goats plus a thickening layer of goat poo. True, there were roses climbing up the walls, but their branches were as thick as tree trunks and were home to a tribe of small monkeys. And true, there was a quaint English garden that was doing a magnificent impression of a jungle with a treehouse and a garden pond with two hippopotamuses half-hidden among the waterlilies.
A sweet little old lady appeared from the tangle of flowers and came to greet them.
This can’t be Gruinard, thought Nerlin. Everyone said she was frightening.
But it was.
‘Oh, it’s you again,’ she snapped at Dispepsya. ‘I thought you’d learnt your lesson last time.’
‘They made me come,’ said Dispepsya.
‘Wonderful,’ said Gruinard, ‘and I am equally delighted to see you. In fact, you can go home now if you like.’
Turning to Nerlin, she changed her tone entirely.
‘I am honoured and delighted to meet you, Your Majesty,’ she said. ‘Though I should really say “meet you again”.’
‘We’ve met before?’ said Nerlin, slightly anxious that Gruinard might be annoyed because he couldn’t remember.
‘Many years ago,’ said Gruinard. ‘You were a small child imprisoned with your family in the drains by your wife’s terrible father, who, I am delighted to see in my crystal ball, has just fallen into the raging sea for the seven-hundredth and fifty-third time. What makes it doubly sweet is that it was his terrible wife, the Countess Slab, the woman he deserted your lovely mother-in-law for, who pushed him off their rock seven-hundred and fifty-two times. The other time he slipped.33
‘Well, I was just a junior witch in those days. I hadn’t even taken my first mystic’s exam yet,’ Gruinard continued. ‘My parents were great supporters of your beloved father Merlin and would slip down the mountains at night to creep into the drains and visit your family. I remember singing you to sleep with some of those old Transylvania Waters lullabies.34 You used to lie in your little sink and gurgle with delight and reach out to Slime Boy with a big grin until you fell fast asleep.’
‘Wow,’ said Nerlin. ‘You can remember more of my childhood than I can.’
‘Well, you were only fourteen,’ said Gruinard. ‘And I must say, it is wonderful to see you again. I wi
sh I had made contact when you came back and reclaimed the throne, but this valley has such a hold on me that I cannot leave it.’
‘None of us even knew this place was here,’ said Nerlin.
While Dispepsya went back along the path and down through the clouds, which parted to show her the way and closed again when she had passed, Gruinard took Nerlin inside her cottage, sat him down and put the kettle on.
‘I think I know what is ailing you,’ she called from the kitchen, ‘but one can never be certain. First we will have a cup of Gravitea, which will stop you falling over while I do my tests.’
When they had finished their Gravitea and were feeling perfectly balanced, Gruinard took two sticks of celery and stuck one in each of Nerlin’s ears. She put two fingers in the middle of his forehead, closed her eyes and concentrated.
‘Mmm, interesting,’ she said.
‘What?’ said Nerlin, who couldn’t hear anything because he had two sticks of celery stuck in his ears.
‘Well, you’re not suffering from celeriac or any other green vegetables,’ said Gruinard. ‘I’d have sworn you had a touch of broccoli.’
‘Oh no,’ said Nerlin. ‘I’ve never touched broccoli, not since Geoffrey-Geoffrey told me it could give you global warming.’
‘Geoffrey-Geoffrey?’ said Gruinard. ‘How come I haven’t heard of this person?’
Nerlin then spent ten minutes explaining about his invisible friend and how he had come into his life around about the time he began feeling strange, odd, ill, spaced-out and weird, though not necessarily in that order.
‘Geoffrey-Geoffrey has been of great comfort to me,’ said Nerlin.
‘Or maybe a curse,’ Gruinard suggested.
‘No, no, of course not. Geoffrey-Geoffrey is my friend,’ said Nerlin.
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit strange that he turned up at exactly the same time you got ill?’ said Gruinard.
‘Oh no,’ said Nerlin.
Let’s remember, Nerlin didn’t have many close friends, so the idea that Geoffrey-Geoffrey might be less than wonderful was not something he wanted to think about.
‘Is he here now?’ Gruinard asked.
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