Floods 7

by Colin Thompson

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Mordonna, ‘these strange people could be very useful.’

  ‘You have a plan?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘Several.’

  It was dark by then, which meant none of the hippies could see what the Floods were doing. So they collected seventeen sticks, three paper bags, four gold rings and a partridge in a pear tree in a pile next to the van. Mordonna got out her best wand – not the one she used every day for boiling kettles and getting rid of spots, but her special occasion wand – and, with a couple of spells, she turned the pile into several bedrooms, a kitchen and the only bathroom in the valley.

  The chanting stopped and the Floods watched the group of flickering lights disperse as the Namelesses went back to their vans, tents and yurty things.

  ‘Thank goodness that’s over,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Valla, ‘the vibrations have loosened my earwax a treat.’

  As the family all sat round cleaning out their ears with blunt sticks,8 Nameless came up to them.

  ‘OK, like, people, the Cool One has summoned you into his Aura,’ he said to Mordonna.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s, like, a seriously awesome invitation.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yeah, man. I mean, not everyone gets summoned into the Aura,’ said Nameless. ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘So much for you all rejecting the petty privileged class system of the outside world,’ said Mordonna. ‘Now you go and tell your so-called Cool One that if he wants to see me, he can come here.’

  ‘Oh, no, man, I can’t possibly do that,’ said Nameless, obviously terrified at the prospect.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The Cool One never comes out of the Aura Area.’

  ‘What, never?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So none of you have ever even seen him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you mean that he never sets foot outside his yurt?’ said Betty.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Nameless. ‘He comes out quite often.’

  ‘So you have all seen him then?’

  ‘No, he comes out wearing his floating yurt,’ said Nameless. ‘It’s like a personal tent that covers him from head to foot. Though my sister Nameless says that once, when she was lying on the grass in the pose of the dandelion, she saw one of his toes.’

  ‘I wonder why he won’t let anyone see him,’ said Betty. ‘I bet he’s really ugly.’

  ‘No, he says his aura is, like, so bright that if any of us saw it, it would strike us, like, totally blind.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Betty.

  ‘Well, off you go and give him my message,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ Nameless whimpered. ‘Please don’t make me.’

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be a community of free spirits with no rules and no one telling you what to do and everyone being equal?’

  ‘Yeah, we, like, totally are.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, man, the Cool One tells us that.’

  ‘Do you know what a dictatorship is?’ Mordonna asked.

  Nameless had no answer to that so Mordonna clicked her fingers and performed a bravery spell and sent Nameless off to the Cool One with her message.

  Obviously the Cool One was not happy with the message because the air around his orange yurt turned purple and Nameless came running back.

  ‘I, er, I, er, I, er …’ was all he could say.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Mordonna. ‘Just relax.’

  ‘The Cool One is furious. He says if you don’t go into his Aura, like, immediately, he will perform the Stamping On Uncool Ones Dance and make you leave Nowhere.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mordonna. ‘We’ll see about that. Come on, everyone, let’s go and sort this Cool One out.’

  So Mordonna, Nerlin, Queen Scratchrot, the seven children and Mildred Flambard-Flood went and stood in a row outside the orange yurt. Mordonna put her forefinger on her forehead and concentrated until she knew everything there was to know about the Cool One.

  ‘Barry Trubshaw, come out here right now,’ she called in a voice that was loud enough for the Cool One to hear, but not the Namelesses, who were too scared to come any closer than ten metres from the orange yurt.

  A single very long swear word came out of the yurt, followed by silence.

  ‘Barry Trubshaw, if you do not come out right now, I will begin to shout and all of your so-called followers will hear every word,’ Mordonna continued.

  ‘Shan’t.’

  ‘Last chance.’

  ‘Go away. I, the Cool One, order you to go away right now.’

  ‘You are not the Cool One. You are not even the slightest bit cool,’ said Mordonna. ‘You are Barry Trubshaw, a forty-five-year-old filing clerk who lost his job for stealing paperclips and whose hobby is collecting Belgian postage stamps. And if you don’t come out here this instant, I will say all that very loudly so everyone in Nowhere can hear me. And, Barry Trubshaw, I will fetch your mother.’

  Muttering and scuffling and more muttering came out of the darkness, followed by a short, overweight, balding middle-aged man in a dirty vest and even dirtier shorts.

  The Cool One was about as cool as a freshly laid cowpat.

  His moustache made him as cool as a freshly laid cowpat that had just been stood in by the cow that had been following the one that had made it.

  The final touch was the plastic Star Trek medallion round his neck, which made him as cool as a freshly laid cowpat that had just been stood in by a lot of cows and was now covered in a swarm of hungry flies.9

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ said Barry Trubshaw, moving back into the shadows.

  ‘OK,’ said Mordonna. ‘Here is the deal. You are going to help me and I am going to help you.’

  ‘OK, OK, can we just talk inside?’ said Barry Trubshaw, stepping further back into the darkness.

  ‘No problem,’ said Mordonna, following him into the yurt.

  Meanwhile …

  The Hearse Whisperer knew that the Hulberts knew the Flood family. She knew they knew that she knew and she also knew, or rather guessed, that Mordonna had protected them with a spell that she would not be able to break no matter how much magic or force she tried to use.

  But the Hulberts were the only clue she had to the whereabouts of the Floods.

  So while the Hulberts slept, she transformed herself into a cockroach, her favourite disguise. She slipped under the front door of their house and took samples of dirt from under all of their fingernails. To do this she had to transform herself into a small monkey because cockroaches, although gorgeous, are rubbish at sample collecting. They simply can’t undo the top of the sample collecting jar.

  Baby Claude Hulbert woke up while the Hearse Whisperer was digging under his fingernails. Seeing a small furry animal in front of him, he grabbed it. For the next hour he cuddled the Hearse Whisperer tight, gurgling happily to himself until he finally fell asleep again. Incredibly, the Hearse Whisperer had found herself in exactly the same situation before. On those other occasions she had simply fried the little gurglers to a crisp and eaten them. This time, however, she suspected, quite rightly, that if she fried baby Claude something similar could well happen to her. She was sure that Mordonna would have protected the Hulberts with some sort of Back-At-You-Spell so anything she did to any of them would be done to her too. To test the theory she made a pimple appear on Claude’s bottom. Sure enough, not one but ten pimples popped up on her own.10

  So she lay there for an hour being gurgled at and fighting a terrible urge to turn herself into a really prickly hedgehog. Then she slipped out of Claude’s arms, carried her samples downstairs, changed back into her almost human form and quietly slipped out of the house.

  As devious and clever as the Hearse Whisperer was, Winchflat Flood was cleverer. His Hulbert-Sensing-Device told him that the combined weight of the Hulbert family had decreased by 0.002 grams at a time when
they were fast asleep and therefore not going to the toilet or sweating.11

  ‘The Hearse Whisperer has just collected samples from the Hulberts,’ he reported. ‘Just as I thought she would.’

  In the secrecy of her room back at the Happy Traveller Motel, the Hearse Whisperer fed the samples into her ultra-miniature super-computer. It told her that the Hulberts had been on holiday and it told her where.

  It analysed a minute speck of bacon and told her that they had stayed at the Hotel Splendide.

  ‘Thank you, computer,’ said the Hearse Whisperer. ‘Of course, I had worked all this out myself, but it’s useful to have you to confirm my findings.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said the computer.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘So what do you need me for, then?’ said the computer, using Voice No. 4 (Grumpy).

  ‘Well, I don’t, actually …’ the Hearse Whisperer began to say.

  ‘OK then,’ the computer interrupted and totally shut down.

  This happened every single time the Hearse Whisperer used the computer. She simply could not handle the fact that a machine small enough to fit in her pocket could do stuff that she couldn’t. And the computer couldn’t handle the Hearse Whisperer’s complete lack of respect for her awesome powers and always powered down in a huge sulk.

  Then the Hearse Whisperer had to find the install disc and spend an hour coaxing and apologising to make the computer boot up again. The Hearse Whisperer didn’t do apologising very well and always ended up in a really bad mood, which meant she then had to go out and hurt some poor innocent human or animal to make herself feel better.12

  The Hearse Whisperer checked into the Hotel Splendide under the name of Henrietta Widdenshaw – because, as everyone knows, if you ever use a false name it has to have the same initials as your real name. This is an International Law that even creatures as vile as the Hearse Whisperer always obey.

  It took her less than five seconds to sniff out that the Hulberts and the Floods had been there. Their scent was everywhere. Now all she had to do was follow the scents out of the hotel and see where they had gone. This took a lot longer. She followed the scent of the two families all over the beach, in and out of the theatre and even round to the council dog pound, but all the trails just ended up back at the hotel.

  At last, she got lucky. She followed Valla’s scent to the graveyard and to the tomb of Mildred Flambard. As she sat on the heavy stone lid, her eye spied something that was almost trodden into the mud in one of Valla’s footprints. Apart from one tiny corner it had been completely buried. She reached down and retrieved it.

  It was a scrap of paper.

  ‘They think they are so clever, those Floods,’ she laughed to herself and to two bored bats that were hanging on a branch above her. ‘But they always leave a clue.’

  It was true. The Floods had previously managed to trap the Hearse Whisperer in a magic bottle and bury that bottle at the bottom of the deepest ocean13 until an earthquake had set her free. They had been careless then and left an envelope attached to the bottle that had led the Hearse Whisperer to Acacia Avenue.

  Now they had done it again.

  ‘Amateurs,’ sneered the Hearse Whisperer.

  She smoothed the scrap of paper out on the top of Mildred Flambard’s tomb. It was a flimsy copy from a credit card transaction, and although the mud and rain had washed away a lot of the information, there was enough left to see that it was Mordonna Flood’s credit card and she had used it to buy ten first-class steamer tickets to Tristan da Cunha.

  ‘Oh, not there again!’ she said. ‘How obvious to hide in the most remote place on earth.’

  Because it is the most remote place on earth, Tristan da Cunha is also one of the most difficult to reach. It would be weeks before any ship the Floods had escaped on would reach the place. When they did, the Hearse Whisperer would be waiting for them. She would fly there – something the Floods could not do because, no matter what birds they transformed themselves into, Betty Flood and the twins were too young to make such a long journey. That was why they were travelling by sea.

  Every time witches or wizards transform themselves into another life form it drains away some of their power. This is not like giving blood, where you always make more blood. The power they lose does not come back. So transformation is not something wizards do lightly. Some wizards never do it. Because of the nature of her job as a very evil secret agent and spy, however, the Hearse Whisperer had had to transform herself many, many times and the truth was that her terrible powers, although still awesome, were down to about twenty per cent of their original strength.

  She knew this. It was her fate. She lived to serve the Kings of Transylvania Waters and she knew that when her powers fell to below thirteen per cent it would be time to retire. Like so many spies before her, the Hearse Whisperer would spend the rest of her days as a chiropodist in the Street of a Thousand Chiropodists that clung to the West Wall of Castle Twilight.14

  She already knew what her business slogan would be:

  A new Hearse Whisperer would be created and thus life, the universe and conspiracy would go on.

  So she transformed herself into a giant albatross and soared up into the sky to catch a giant thermal15 that would carry her to Tristan da Cunha.

  ‘She has taken the bait,’ said Winchflat as he pored over the dials of his Hearse-Whisperer-Detector,16 ‘and she is on her way to Tristan da Cunha.’

  ‘Who would have thought it?’ said Valla. ‘I’ve really got to hand it to you, little brother. You are a genius.’

  ‘Indeed you are, my boy,’ said Nerlin. ‘I wish I had your brains.’

  ‘I could make you a photocopy of them,’ Winchflat offered.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ said Mordonna. ‘Your father is perfect the way he is.’

  Mordonna really meant it. She had fallen in love with Nerlin as he was and did not want him to change. And she most certainly did not like the idea of having a husband cleverer or even nearly as clever as she was.

  ‘Just leave your father’s brain alone,’ she said. ‘I have to go back and sort this Barry Trubshaw out.’

  ‘Why bother?’ said Betty. ‘Why don’t we just leave?’

  ‘Because he is going to help us get Vessel back.’

  She went back to the yurt, where she had left Barry Trubshaw in suspended animation when Betty had come over to tell her there was news about the Hearse Whisperer.

  ‘OK,’ Mordonna said to Barry now, clicking her fingers so he could move again, ‘here is the deal. You are going to do one simple little thing for me and I am going to make you into everything you have been pretending to be.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Barry Trubshaw.

  ‘I will make you tall, dark and handsome. I will give you charisma. I will clear all the rubbish out of your head and off your top lip and make you wise, sexy and seventeen years younger. In other words, I will make you into the Cool One – for real,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you can’t do that,’ said Barry.

  ‘Oh yes I can,’ said Mordonna. ‘I am a witch – not a tie-dyed-skirt-and-jangly-bells pretend witch, but a genuine witch with powers you have never dreamed of.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Barry. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday. There’s no such thing as witches.’

  ‘I’ll prove it,’ said Mordonna. ‘What is the one thing you want more than anything in the world?’

  Barry Trubshaw opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say a word, Mordonna held up her hand and said, ‘The one thing you want more than anything in the whole world is something you are not even sure exists. The one thing you want more than anything in the whole world is a twelve-and-a-half-franc 1905 Belgian Mauve, a stamp so rare that no one has ever seen one in the flesh and the only proof it ever existed at all is one old faded photograph.’

  Barry Trubshaw’s mouth was still open but it was speechless. All he could do was give a feeble nod. As he did so it began to snow in
side the yurt. Mauve snow drifted down in gentle flakes, appearing out of the darkness above them.

  And every flake, all five thousand of them, was a genuine twelve-and-a-half-franc 1905 Belgian Mauve stamp.

  ‘There you are,’ said Mordonna. ‘That is every Belgian Mauve stamp ever printed, the entire stock resurrected from the ashes of the Great Belgian Stamp Printing Works fire of 1905 that destroyed them all the day before they were due to be released to the post offices of Belgium.’

  Barry Trubshaw’s mouth, still open, now made a noise. It whimpered.

  ‘Of course, with five thousand of them, their legendary status and staggering value no longer exists,’ said Mordonna. ‘So I will now return four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight of them to the dust I collected them from, leaving you with two priceless treasures, one to keep and one to sell for an obscenely high price.’

  Barry Trubshaw finally closed his mouth. He fell to his knees and tenderly picked up the two remaining stamps and placed them between the pages of his favourite book – an unpublished epic called My Incredibly Brilliant and Exciting Life by B. Trubshaw. Then he took them out again and placed them between the pages of his least favourite book – My Son is a Twerp by Mrs Trubshaw17 – where they would be much safer.

  ‘What must I do, oh great and wonderful witch?’ he said and he meant every word.

  ‘Oh, nothing too difficult,’ said Mordonna. ‘You just have to go and collect an old birdcage.’

  ‘Is there an old bird in the old birdcage?’

  ‘There is, and he must be treated with the greatest care,’ said Mordonna. ‘For he is more than he seems, not so much an old bird as my mother’s boyfriend under an evil spell.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Barry Trubshaw, wondering why someone as powerful as Mordonna could not go and get the cage herself.

  ‘Will I, er, be in, like, danger?’ he asked.