Floods 11

by Colin Thompson

  Mordonna shook her head, growing less assertive as Nerlin grew more assertive. His voice had taken on a deeper tone, which was hard to resist.

  ‘Our daughter, our sweet little Betty, can fly,’ said Nerlin.

  Mordonna wished she was human so she could faint. This was earth-shattering news. She had always suspected that Merlin could fly, though never actually seen him do it, but she had also thought that if he could, then he was probably the only wizard or witch who could because he was the most talented and powerful wizard in the world. To discover her own little girl could also fly was unbelievable.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she managed to say eventually.

  ‘My father came to visit me last night and told me,’ Nerlin said. ‘I was so amazed that I almost wished I was human so I could faint.

  ‘And of course,’ Nerlin continued, ‘this means our own little girl is a witch of staggering power. Maybe it’s not fully developed yet, but it is there, and that means the two of you have to stop fighting, because no matter how much magic you summon up, she will always be able to summon up more.’

  Mordonna felt totally deflated. She just wanted to go to her bed, curl up and sleep forever like her Forever-Asleep-Aunt Cronulla, who had gone to bed three hundred and seventeen years earlier after being told her nose was too small and no wizard would ever want to marry her. She had been asleep ever since, which had saved a fortune on food, heating and bedclothes, but did mean her family could never have any visitors to stay because Cronulla was using the spare room. When the Floods had moved back to Transylvania Waters, they had offered to take her in. Castle Twilight had hundreds of rooms and there was even a specific tower just for storing strange, sleeping, dead or any other non-functioning-state relatives.22

  Nerlin, who had been given an enormous wisdom transplant by Merlin, was very upset to see his wonderful wife so deflated, so he came up with a solution.

  ‘Right, here is what’s going to happen,’ he said to Mordonna. ‘We all know you do not want Betty and Ffiona to open a restaurant because you think they will probably end up poisoning all their customers, and there is no denying that Betty’s cooking is in a class of its own. I think some of her recipes could kill you just by reading the menu.’

  Mordonna nodded.

  ‘But then,’ Nerlin said to Betty, ‘you have your heart set on a restaurant. I mean, you’ve even gone to the complicated trouble of buying this place, and I must say, right opposite the castle gates is probably the most perfect place. However – and even you have to admit this – your food is deadly.’

  Betty nodded.

  ‘So here is the solution,’ Nerlin concluded. ‘First of all you have to stop fighting each other. Mordonna, my darling, you must not see our little girl as a threat, but be incredibly proud that you have produced a daughter who can fly and will one day be as great a wizard as her grandfather.’

  Mordonna agreed.

  ‘And there is one thing you have to do before you are allowed to open your restaurant,’ Nerlin said to Betty. ‘You must enter The Cheffie Olympics cooking competition on TV –’

  Betty agreed.

  ‘– and win,’ Mordonna added, absolutely certain that Betty wouldn’t even make the semi-semi-semi-preliminary-sub-semi-finals, never mind win.

  ‘Um, OK,’ said Betty, who knew what her mother was up to, but also knew she had enough power now to win anything, even the Famous Patagonian Underwater Jelly Sculpture Biennale. ‘No problem.’

  Then Nerlin took his wife and daughter back to Castle Twilight and up to the tallest tower looking out across Transylvania Waters. He summoned all his other children. As the sun came up over the distant mountains on a wonderful new day, the Floods family did something together they had hardly had time for since they left Acacia Avenue. They drank delicious warm blood slurpies, which Betty made for them all with delicious added crushed locust and delicious frozen gristle cubes, which everyone actually liked.

  The next night Betty went to visit Merlin to bring him up to date and ask his advice.

  ‘I didn’t know you went to visit my dad,’ she said.

  ‘Just a little bit of insurance,’ Merlin said. ‘After all, you are very young to have such awesome powers and you need loving people like your dad around you.’

  ‘You should have seen my mum’s face when Dad told her I could fly. It was brilliant,’ said Betty.

  ‘I’m not sure it was such a good idea, but since I upgraded his brain I have every confidence in his judgement,’ said the old wizard, ‘and everything does seem to have calmed down now.’

  Betty asked if she could tell Ffiona about her newfound magic and being able to fly and Merlin said it would be all right as long as she performed a Tongue-Tying Spell so Ffiona couldn’t tell anyone else even by mistake.

  Betty couldn’t wait to tell Ffiona the news and flew straight back to her friend’s room.

  ‘Let me in,’ she said, tapping on Ffiona’s window. ‘By the way, it’s me, Betty, so you don’t have to faint.’

  Ffiona woke up from her favourite dream, which involved knitting a jumper out of strawberry flavoured wool with toffee buttons and a cute kitten in each pocket, and was recently voted one of the world’s top fifty most boring dreams of all time.

  ‘Ooeerr, wow,’ Ffiona cried out and fainted, which meant Betty had to force the window open from outside and break one of her fingernails.

  ‘What were you doing out there?’ said Ffiona. ‘I thought you were a burglar.’

  ‘There aren’t any burglars in Transylvania Waters. I’ve told you that before,’ said Betty.

  ‘Yes, but how did you get out there?’

  ‘I flew there.’

  ‘What, on a magic broomstick?’

  ‘No, don’t be silly,’ said Betty. ‘I did it like this.’

  She spread out her arms and rose into the air. Needless to say, Ffiona spread out her arms and fainted.

  ‘I really must go to the castle library and look up an Anti-Fainting Spell,’ Betty said, and while her friend was unconscious she did a custom Tongue-Tying Spell so she could tell Ffiona everything when she woke up knowing the spell would stop Ffiona telling anyone else. What would happen if Ffiona forgot herself and started telling someone that her best friend could fly was that she would suddenly recite Jack and Jill – the really rude version – though of course being such an innocent and good girl, she wouldn’t actually understand what a lot of the words meant.

  ‘Were you flying just then?’

  ‘Yes, it’s brilliant.’

  ‘Could you teach me to do it?’ said Ffiona.

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Betty. ‘As far as I know there’s only my grandfather and me who can do it, without a broomstick that is.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Ffiona and she kept saying it over and over again as Betty told her how all her magic had started working properly and how her parents would let them open the restaurant if they won The Cheffie Olympics and about setting Mordonna’s hair on fire and how brilliant her dad had been.

  ‘Wow. So does that mean we’re not grounded anymore?’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Yes, so today, we’ll go and find Letitia Puddle’s recipe book and the well,’ said Betty. ‘But first we’ll get a tall fence put up around the place so no one can see what we’re doing inside.’

  ‘Who’s going to do that?’

  ‘The castle carpenters,’ said Betty.

  ‘Won’t you have to ask your mum and dad?’

  ‘I’m fairly certain I can do pretty much whatever I like now,’ said Betty.

  ‘Wow,’ said Ffiona, who had become extremely skilled at using that word.

  After lunch the two girls poked around in the back garden looking for the enchanted well.

  ‘It looks like someone’s tried to burn the place down,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Yes, it was my mum,’ said Betty. ‘But at least it’s got rid of all the old dead leaves and rubbish.’

  After an hour or so, they found the well. Actually, they found tw
o wells. Betty had been searching on one side of the garden while Ffiona had searched the other, and at exactly the same time they had both called out, ‘Here it is.’

  ‘Uh oh,’ said Betty. ‘That is not good.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Ffiona. ‘You were looking for one well and now you’ve got two. That’s great.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Betty realising that most of the world of magic was a complete mystery to her friend. ‘When you have two wells, one is the anti-well and does the opposite of the good well. It’s one of the fundamental laws of wizardry.’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘Well, supposing you are really thirsty and you draw some water from one of a pair of wells – one of them will stop you being thirsty and the other will make you much more thirsty.’

  ‘But if you took a tiny sip from the wrong well and it made you more thirsty, couldn’t you just drink a big glass of water from the other well and it would be all right?’ asked Ffiona.

  ‘If you could do it really, really quickly,’ Betty explained. ‘And I mean really quickly, like within a split second, otherwise you would be so thirsty that you would totally dehydrate and end up as a little pile of dust on the floor.’

  ‘So these two wells …’ Ffiona began.

  ‘One will make you younger, not like going back to being a baby, but just back to before you started getting wrinkles and going grey,’ Betty explained, ‘and the anti-well would make you grow very, very old, almost in an instant.’

  ‘Oh. So how do we find out which well is which?’

  ‘We’ll have to do some experiments,’ said Betty.

  ‘Who on?’ said Ffiona. ‘I mean, who are you going to get to try them?’

  ‘We’ll just go down Ye Olde Science Supplies Shop in town and buy a box of kittens,’ said Betty.

  ‘WHAT?!’ said Ffiona. ‘You mean, they sell kittens for, like, science experiments?’

  ‘Oh yes, and they’re not expensive,’ Betty explained. ‘I use them all the time to test my new recipes. Last time I got some they were about ten dolors23 a dozen.’

  ‘But kittens?’ said Ffiona, looking as if she was about to burst into tears for she did love kitties. ‘They are the same here as they were at home, lovely soft cuddly sweet furry animals that purr and curl up on your lap and love you.’

  ‘No kittens anywhere are like that,’ said Betty. ‘Cats are horrible evil animals that only pretend to love you. They only do all that cuddly purring rubbish so you’ll be their servants and give them somewhere warm to sleep and clean up their poo and feed them.’

  ‘No, no, cats are lovely,’ Ffiona protested.

  ‘Really? So why do they creep silently up behind little birds and rip them to shreds?’

  ‘Well, um, that’s just nature,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Yes, it is their nature,’ said Betty. ‘And their nature is to hijack small furry animals and birds and torture them for a bit and then rip them to bits and probably not even eat them because they are so full of gross CuddlyCat tinned food you’ve just fed them.

  ‘And,’ Betty continued, ‘I bet you didn’t know that every noise a cat makes, even purring, is actually a really rude swearword.’24

  ‘But doing experiments on them?’ Ffiona protested.

  ‘Would you rather use puppies?’ Betty asked. ‘We could, but they’re a lot more expensive.’

  Betty told Ffiona that she had three choices. They could buy some kittens and get them to drink the two lots of water, or they could do the same thing with puppies, or Ffiona could drink them herself.

  ‘Couldn’t you get something nasty like a rat to drink them?’ said Ffiona.

  Betty was horrified.

  ‘Rats? Rats?’ she said. ‘They are wonderful animals. I wouldn’t dream of using them for experiments. I’ve a good mind to report you to the RSPCR – The Royal Society for the Protection of Cuddly Rats – of which I am this year’s president.’

  ‘But …’ Ffiona began, but she realised that once again Transylvania Waters and the world of witches and wizards was just not the same as her world.

  ‘Besides, what’s the worst that can happen? One kitty will be pretty well exactly the same except a few days younger, and the other one will get very, very old and drop dead in less time than it will take for your tears to run down your face and drip off your chin. So it won’t even have time to wonder what’s going on,’ Betty explained.

  ‘We could go and ask Letitia Puddle which well is which,’ Ffiona suggested.

  And they did, but the old lady couldn’t even remember there’d been two wells.

  ‘I’ve always been a bit cross-eyed,’ she said. ‘I probably thought they were just one well, especially as I’m numberblind too.’

  ‘Numberblind?’

  ‘Yes, it’s like being colourblind only with numbers,’ said Letitia Puddle. ‘Now I come to think of it, there were a few customers who drank the water and suddenly turned into little piles of dust. We just brushed them up and sprinkled them round the rose bushes, which grew beautifully.’

  ‘A few?’ said Ffiona. ‘Well, how many?’

  ‘Ooh, I can’t remember. About fifty or so?’

  ‘You mean, fifty people came to your tearoom and dropped dead?’ said Ffiona, horrified.

  ‘Didn’t you sort of get into trouble?’ said Betty.

  ‘Oh no,’ Letitia Puddle explained. ‘The death certificates always put the cause of death as a “pre-existing condition” and the coroner said he was amazed they hadn’t died sooner.’

  Ffiona was speechless, but Betty nodded as if it wasn’t at all surprising. Transylvania Waters’s coroner Aloysius Puddle had always been a very understanding coroner, and on top of that he had been very fond of his little sister, Letitia. Now, at one-hundred and fifty, he kept talking of retiring, but no one would hear a word of it.

  ‘If I were you I’d do a Kitty Test,’ said Letitia.

  So the two girls went back to Castle Twilight, and Betty said she would go down to Ye Olde Science Supplies Shop and get a dozen kitties.

  ‘Though I might still have a couple in my kitchen drawer,’ she said. ‘Be silly to waste ten dolors if I don’t need to.’

  Ffiona said that she would go up to her room and have a bit of a lie down and do some being miserable and cry for a while.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come and watch?’ said Betty, who realised that she would never understand humans when Ffiona said no.

  I mean, humans are only too happy to fight huge wars for the most stupid little reasons and hack each other to bits or blow each other up or make other humans into slaves, Betty thought, and they can even find really good excuses for doing it all, but give a couple of evil little kittens a drink of water and they scream blue murder.

  Betty did have two kittens that had survived her New and Exciting Things to do with Bacon experiments. They were a bit grubby and miserable, having been stuck in a drawer with some very old bacon for a couple of weeks, but as bacon is very salty and salt makes you thirsty, they were the perfect choice.

  She took them over the tearoom garden and gave each one a bowl of water, one from the left well and one from the right well.

  Betty looked from kitten to kitten as they drank.

  The black and white kitten that was drinking the right-well water looked exactly as it had done before.

  The ginger kitten didn’t.

  But it wasn’t a little pile of ash. It wasn’t even dead.

  It had changed into a piglet and was running round the garden squealing with delight.

  ‘Oops,’ said Betty. ‘It must have something to do with all the bacon I’ve been feeding it.’

  And it was. Betty ran down to Ye Olde Science Supplies Shop and bought a dozen Special Kittens, which were like ordinary kittens, but had little user guides around their necks that gave precise details of their history. This included what they had been fed for the past two weeks. This sort of information was very important for research work that had very detail
ed specific criteria. Also, if the scientist was from a culture where pigs were taboo, the last thing he would want was for his experimental kitty to explode and cover him in bacon.

  The Special Kittens cost double, but Betty knew she had no choice.

  The first kitty had been eating beef and when it drank the water from the left-hand well, it turned into a cow.

  The second kitty had been eating chicken and that was what it turned into.

  The third kitty was not so lucky and turned into a pile of cornflakes.

  Betty thought if she organised things properly she could be serving dinosaur burgers and endangered species stew in her restaurant. All she would need would be a minute bit of dinosaur fossil or a feather or a bit of fur from a rare animal.

  Then she wondered what would happen if she cut her own toenails, blended them with a bit of her own hair and fed that to a kitten.

  OMG times fifty million, she thought. It would turn into me.

  That idea made her heart race with excitement and total panic. She was so tempted to do it. The idea of having an exact double had so many possibilities. But on the other hand if it was exactly the same as her, they would spend all day trying to boss each other around and then she panicked at the thought that her double might kill her while she was asleep and take her place, except it was already her place, so it would be taking its own place and …

  Lots more OMGs, she said to herself, and before the almost irresistible temptation could make her do it, she sent for two of the castle’s handymen and got them to set a heavy-duty solid steel trap door over the left well with a massively complicated lock that had a serial number thirty-seven digits long, and she tattooed the number underneath her own tongue backwards.

  Even so, she knew the temptation would always be there calling to her.

  She distracted herself by going back into the teashop to find Letitia Puddle’s recipe book. It’s hidden in the smallest room, Letitia had told her. That had seemed simple at the time, but now Betty wasn’t sure if you would call some small places a room or a cupboard.

  There was a cupboard under the stairs, but surely that wasn’t a room. She’d never heard anyone say something was in the room under the stairs. It was always the cupboard under the stairs, though it was quite a big cupboard and even had a chair in it. Also, there was a big cupboard in the kitchen, which people always called the larder or the pantry, never the food room.