IT’S A NINE THAT’S FALLEN OVER A BIT.
Meanwhile, after a night so cold that the last of the Fruit-Pulp Immersion left in the pool froze over, turning his legs blue, Geoffrey-Geoffrey was in no mood to ‘calm down’.
He had been angry when the fruit pulp had been warmed by the bodies of the chanting crones. He stamped his feet, breaking the layer of ice and desperately trying to think of some new swear words that would be worse than all the ones he had used the day before. Then the sun rose over the high mountains, and the whole valley was filled with its beautiful golden light, but instead of making Geoffrey-Geoffrey feel a bit warmer and a bit happier, it shone right into his eyes and blinded him.
It was one of those days.
And if anyone knew about those sorts of days, it was Geoffrey-Geoffrey.
Since he had been abandoned by his mother in the world’s most remote orphanage with no chance of ever being rescued, he had lived a cursed life.
Food in the orphanage had consisted of snow, pine needles and boiled newspapers. One by one, his seven sisters had fallen prey to cannibals, he himself having eaten at least two burgers before discovering who they were. He had only survived by collecting all the diseases he could find. A fine collection of bubonic plague, massive leaking boils, pimples, verrucas, blackheads and abscesses had meant even the hungriest savage had refused to eat him.
By the time he had been old enough to leave the orphanage, he had grown fond of his revolting disfigurements, so that when nature stepped in and showed him a kindness he did not deserve by curing most of his diseases, he managed to hang onto a few particularly colourful boils by continually digging at them with a rusty fork.
Once free of the orphanage, Geoffrey-Geoffrey walked out of Mongolia during the coldest winter anyone could remember. It had been so cold that all the thermometers had frozen solid, and so no one could actually tell just how cold it had been.
To this day there are seven of Geoffrey-Geoffrey’s toes and three fingers frozen solid in remote snowdrifts. On the warmest day of the year, when the ice melts down to a mere seven metres thick, Geoffrey-Geoffrey can hear his missing digits calling out to him from their frozen tombs.38
By the time he’d reached civilisation and places where the ground wasn’t just grey and white, Geoffrey-Geoffrey was frozen through to the marrow in his bones and he has stayed that way ever since, even if he visits places where the sun shines all day and there are heatwaves.
When he saw fresh green grass for the first time, he was so overwhelmed that he couldn’t move. He stood on the front lawn of a suburban garden in a small Russian town and just stared at the trees and flowers, completely hypnotised.
‘Oh, look, Sergei,’ said the lady of the house, ‘someone has left a garden gnome on our front lawn.’
‘Quick,’ said Sergei, ‘let us carry it into the back garden before anyone sees and thinks we have come into a fortune.’
So Geoffrey-Geoffrey stood in the back garden, still unable to move, and for the next three weeks he stared at Sergei and Irenka’s outside lavatory, though calling six planks put together with second-hand nails, a leaky cardboard bucket, and a half-eaten horse blanket a lavatory was a bit of an overstatement.
But someone had seen Sergei carrying Geoffrey-Geoffrey into their back garden, and one dark night the thief threw him into a sack and carried him off. This brought Geoffrey-Geoffrey out of his trance, and three days later all that was found of the thief were his broken false teeth, his left kneecap and a small part of the sack.
Full of roasted thief, Geoffrey-Geoffrey then crossed Russia and reached Ukraine, still unsure of where he was aiming for.
He only had one link to his past. He might have had more when he was dumped as a baby in the orphanage, but anything of the tiniest value had been taken from him within five minutes of his arrival. However, there was one clue that could not be so easily stolen. In his left armpit was the following tattoo:
St. Ghoul’s Hospital
Transylvania Waters
Baby number: 667
Like most people, he had never heard of Transylvania Waters and his total lack of any education meant that he couldn’t read or write, so that even if he had heard of Transylvania Waters, he wouldn’t have known it was written in his armpit. In fact, he had hardly learnt to speak, and the tiny vocabulary he did have was from a very obscure version of the Mongolian language.
But every cloud has a silver lining, even for a creature as vile as Geoffrey-Geoffrey, and not long after escaping from the gnome thief, he was discovered whimpering in a ditch by a kindly, old turnip-farmer’s wife, Berylinka, whose one regret in life had been that she had never had any children or puppies.
In Geoffrey-Geoffrey she realised she had both, and had showered him with love and nice things.39 The only thing she did wrong was dress him in girl’s clothes. This was not because she didn’t realise he was a boy, but because she had a whole drawer full of girl’s clothes, waiting for the daughter she had never had. Luckily, Geoffrey-Geoffrey actually liked wearing dresses.
Now, Berylinka was not a simple peasant but a university graduate who had become a simple peasant’s wife when her father had lost her in a card game. And so it was that she gave Geoffrey-Geoffrey an education. In no time at all he became fluent in trigonometry and advanced microbiology, but he still couldn’t read or write. But by another wonderful twist of fate, it turned out that Berylinka’s husband was not actually a simple peasant either, but a secret agent posing as one.
‘This is news to me, Joseph,’ Berylinka said to her husband.
‘That, my darlingski, is because I am a secret agent,’ Joseph explained. ‘In fact, I am so secret that for the first fifteen years, even I did not know I was a secret agent.’
Joseph was also a university graduate, with seven degrees in foreign languages. And so it was that Geoffrey-Geoffrey learned to read and write and finally discovered what his tattoo said.
‘That is a stroke of good luck, my little babushky,’ said Berylinka. ‘If you travel to our easternmost border you will cross into Transylvania Waters, or so I have been told.’
‘Then, Muminski,’ Geoffrey-Geoffrey said, ‘that is where I must go.’
‘But you will come back to us, won’t you?’ said Berylinka and Joseph. ‘For we love you like a daughter, sorry, like a son.’
‘I will,’ said Geoffrey-Geoffrey. ‘For you have shown me more kindness than anyone. But I must go back to my roots if only to exact terrible revenge on a mother who so cruelly abandoned me.’
‘Indeed, that is our way,’ said Berylinka.
‘In the meantime,’ said Joseph, ‘now that Berylinka and I know each other as clever university graduates and not the simple peasants we pretended to be, we shall pass our days playing Scrabble and doing Mensa tests.’
‘Too right,’ said Berylinka. ‘Stuff the turnips.’
A week later, wearing his best frock, Geoffrey-Geoffrey was knocking on the door of St Ghoul’s Hospital. The office staff, having spent a long time admiring his lovely dress, found the records for baby 667 and Geoffrey-Geoffrey discovered who his mother was. He also discovered that Nerlin, the King of Transylvania Waters, and the rest of the Floods had destroyed her.
He vowed total revenge, total in that it would mean the complete annihilation of the entire Floods family.
‘I will start at the top with the King and work down to the tiniest grandchild,’ he said. ‘I will not rest until I have destroyed them all.’
No one had told him that the Floods were a family of wizards, but he was so wound up it wouldn’t have stopped him anyway.
‘First, I shall find an evil witch and buy an Invisibility Spell,’ he said to himself. ‘And then I shall ask: Why have I no knowledge of my father? Followed by: Do I have any other living relatives?’
As Geoffrey-Geoffrey marched backwards and forwards in the bottom of the Fruit-Pulp Pool, cursing and thinking that things couldn’t get any worse, he caught his foot on something and fell
flat on his face. He opened his mouth to swear and got a mouthful of fruit pulp that had begun to ferment, but at least it distracted him briefly from the prune that found its way up his left nostril and the drowned sparrow up his right.
He stood up, spat out the pulp and pulled the stuff out of his nose, though a tail feather had become deeply embedded in his sinuses and would forever vibrate in an infuriatingly tickly way every time he sneezed. He bent down and felt through the pulp until he found what it was that had tripped him.
It was a large iron ring.
‘The sort of ring you get on a sink plug,’ he said to himself, and pulled it.
It was jammed tight, but he kept pulling until at last the plug came free.
As the pulp gradually slid down the plughole Geoffrey-Geoffrey sat down to take a rest while the mist from the Impossible Waterfall washed him and the pool clean.
‘That plughole,’ he said to himself, ‘is big enough for me to escape down.’
But you don’t know where the drain goes to, a warning voice said inside his head.
‘I haven’t got to where I am today by listening to warning voices,’ he said.
Yes, but look where you are today, the voice said.
‘Shut up.’
Geoffrey-Geoffrey had learned a long time ago that even when he did listen to warning voices, it didn’t seem to make much difference. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the results had been horrible. The only good thing he could remember, the one time in a hundred, had been when Berylinka had found him in the ditch. And on that occasion no warning voices had been involved anyway. So, in reality, listening to warning voices had ended up being useless one hundred times out of one hundred, which was exactly the same odds as ignoring them.
So Geoffrey-Geoffrey eased himself into the drain. At the last minute he thought he might like to change his mind, but it was too late. The sides of the drain were completely smooth and lubricated with slimy fruit pulp so there was no way of stopping.
‘Gone down the plughole, has he?’ said Gruinard when she and Quenelle went back up to the pool a bit later.
‘Yes, just like you said he would,’ Quenelle said.
‘And did you implant the tracking device inside him?’
‘I did. It’s hidden inside a fake cherry stone lodged securely in his appendix,’ said Quenelle.
‘So at last we shall find out where the drain leads to,’ said Gruinard.
‘Indeed,’ said Quenelle. ‘And I would imagine it must be somewhere very important, considering it carries the sacred Fruit-Pulp dregs.’
Back in Gruinard’s cottage, the two Old Crones, who, now the Fruit-Pulp Immersion had worn off, were old again, opened the secret door under the stairs and went down into the secret room, where Gruinard kept all her gadgets and inventions, most of which had been inspired by a well-thumbed copy of Professor Winchflat’s Wonder Book of Inventions.
When the two Old Crones checked the tracking machine they saw the tiny device buried in Geoffrey-Geoffrey’s stomach leap and jump and wriggle across the screen. Sometimes it would stop, as if looking around, and then move on.
‘If only the device had audio so we could hear what he is saying,’ said Quenelle.
‘It does,’ said Gruinard. ‘I just forgot to turn it on.’
‘M gttng brd,’ said Nerlin. ‘Nd mss my wf.’
‘Ah, you got your “y” back,’ said Quenelle. ‘They always come back first because they’re not a proper vowel, but it does mean that it shouldn’t be too long now before the proper vowels start returning. I think we’ll go back down to my cave this afternoon.’
It was then that Nerlin realised how much he had fallen under the enchanting spell of Gruinard’s hidden valley and the Impossible Waterfall. A large part of him wanted to stay there forever, and if he could have clicked his fingers to bring his family up there to be with him, he would have done so in an instant.
‘But you are the King,’ said Gruinard. ‘You have a responsibility to this country and your people. You can’t just abandon them and live up here.’
‘Cn cme here when retre?’ said Nerlin.
‘Ah, got your “e” back now, Your Majesty,’ said Gruinard. ‘But will you really retire? That’s not how kings and queens work. They stay on their thrones long past the age they should. They do that, because, let’s be honest, they don’t really have any power, nor do they do anything useful, so they carry on long after their brains stop working.’
‘I dn’t wnt t d tht,’ said Nerlin, who now only had his “o”s and “a”s to recover. ‘I wnt t build little cttge up here nd grw flwers nd brussels spruts.’
‘But it’s the tradition,’ said Quenelle. ‘You can’t go against tradition, especially as you’re a king. If kings and queens can’t keep out-of-date, silly things alive, who can?’
‘Then we will change tradition,’ Nerlin insisted with all his vowels functioning smoothly again. ‘Transylvania Waters will lead the world. I shall retire, and my eldest child will become King while he and I still have some working brain cells left.’
‘I suppose it could work,’ Gruinard agreed. ‘Though it’s never been done before.’
‘But if I do it,’ said Nerlin, ‘you wouldn’t mind if I build a little cottage for Mordonna and me up here?’
‘I welcome you to, Your Majesty.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Nerlin. ‘By the way, can I take my Incompetence Pants off now?’
‘You don’t want to keep them as a souvenir?’
Nerlin thought probably not, especially since they had some embarrassing raspberry stains. He then asked about Geoffrey-Geoffrey and was worried to hear he had escaped down a drain.
‘And where do the drains lead to?’ he asked.
‘We’re tracking him at the moment,’ said Gruinard, ‘with our cherry-pip cam.’
‘Yes,’ said Quenelle, ‘and we’re placing bets on where he’ll end up. Do you want to wager a few dolors?’40
Nerlin decided he would have a small bet, if only to take his mind off things. These were the choices:
In Lake Tarnish – most likely outcome. ODDS of 3 to 2.
In the drains beneath Dreary – fairly likely. ODDS of 1 to 1.41
In the main kitchen sink of Castle Twilight. ODDS of 3 to 1.
Back in the Fruit-Pulp Pool because the drains are a möbius strip. ODDS of 9 to 1.
Somewhere in Belgium – we can only hope. ODDS of 25 to 1.
A small hole in Rockall – incredibly unlikely. ODDS of 300017 to 1.42
Nerlin – knowing that Mordonna’s father and the awful Countess Slab were banished to Rockall and he had organised for the Hearse Whisperer, who had been stored in a deep freeze, to be broken into hailstone-sized bits and dropped on Rockall – decided to place twelve dolors on Rockall.43
‘Are you sure?’ said Gruinard. ‘We only put that option in as a joke.’
‘I have a bad feeling about that,’ said Nerlin and told them why.
‘We’d better go down to the cellar and see where Geoffrey-Geoffrey’s got to then,’ said Gruinard.
The room was almost in total darkness, lit only by the tracking screen, which glowed green on the main table. Gruinard sat down and beckoned Nerlin to sit beside her. A small red dot moved slowly and jerkily across the screen, stopping briefly, then shooting forward a bit before settling down to a steady drift towards the top left corner of the display.
‘Why is it moving so erratically?’ said Nerlin.
‘I suppose it must speed up when it comes to a steep drop and the little pause each time is probably Geoffrey-Geoffrey trying to hold on to something to slow himself down,’ said Gruinard.
The red dot stopped moving. Nerlin and Gruinard stared at it in silence for a few minutes, but it stayed exactly where it was.
‘Damn,’ said Gruinard.
‘What’s happened?’ said Nerlin.
‘Well, Geoffrey-Geoffrey is possibly asleep, but it’s unlikely. I mean, would you want to sleep in a dirty old drain, You
r Majesty?’
‘I did every night for the first twenty years of my life,’ said Nerlin.
‘Oh, I forgot. I’m so sorry,’ said Gruinard. ‘Of course, he could be stuck, or dead, or just having a bit of a rest.’
‘There is another option,’ said Nerlin.
‘Which is?’
‘Well, he could have pooed out the cherry stone and be miles away by now.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Gruinard. ‘We put little tiny hooks in the stone so it would anchor itself into his gut and stay there.’
She picked up an intercom and spoke.
‘Can you hear me up there?’
‘Yes,’ said a voice.
‘Put the chain back on the plug and place it into the plug hole,’ Gruinard instructed. ‘Then put the big funnel under the Impossible Waterfall and guide the outlet into the Fruit-Pulp Pool and fill it up. When the water reaches the top, pull the chain and let the water go. I want to give the drain a great big flush-out.’
Gruinard pressed a switch and an image appeared on the screen. It was a map overlay that showed where in the world Geoffrey-Geoffrey was.
‘Right in the middle of Belgium,’ said Gruinard and, pressing a button, added, ‘let’s see if we can hear anything.’
There was a faint blurry noise.
‘I would say that’s snoring,’ said Nerlin. Gruinard agreed.
As they watched there was a loud muffled sound and the red dot shot forward on the screen with lots of angry noises that could only have been swear words.
It was obvious that the water had arrived, flushing Geoffrey-Geoffrey out of his resting place. Within two minutes of it appearing he had crossed the English Channel and was racing north towards Scotland, and it was here that he began to slow down. It took two more good Fruit-Pulp Pool flushes to get Geoffrey-Geoffrey back up to speed and finally he left the Scottish coast and headed out to sea.
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