Pure Dead Batty
Page 1
For more than forty years,
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OTHER YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY
PURE DEAD TROUBLE, Debi Gliori
PURE DEAD MAGIC, Debi Gliori
PURE DEAD WICKED, Debi Gliori
PURE DEAD BRILLIANT, Debi Gliori
SAMMY KEYES AND THE ART OF DECEPTION
Wendelin Van Draanen
SAMMY KEYES AND THE PSYCHO KITTY QUEEN
Wendelin Van Draanen
THE WITCH OF CLATTERINGSHAWS, Joan Aiken
MIDWINTER NIGHTINGALE, Joan Aiken
BUD, NOT BUDDY, Christopher Paul Curtis
Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York
Copyright © 2005 by Debi Gliori
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eISBN: 978-0-307-80932-2
v3.1
This one’s for my boys,
setting sail into deep water.
Contents
Cover
Other Yearling Books You Will Enjoy
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Dramatis Personae
Memento Mori
The Camera Does Not Lie
An Innocent Man
A Man Betrayed
Familiarly Damp
Lost in Time
The Loveliness of Teenagers
Brains Over Brawn
S’tan on the Skids
Titus Waxed
The Diet of Dragons
Tock on Top
The League of Immortals
Love on a Cold Climate
Freshly Minty
Gagged with a Spoon
Letting Go
One of Us
The Moral Munros
The Baleful Bain
For the Love of Lucre
Desert Island Risks
Just Desserts
A Made Man
Lavender’s Blue
The Stinger Stung
Meet the Relatives
Ladybird, Ladybird
Here Comes the Night
Here Comes the Don
Jailhouse Blues
Dainty Dragoness
Luciano Wises Up
A Blot on the Landscape
Death at Sea
Sweet Dreams
Still Me Inside
Gliossary
Dramatis Personae
THE FAMILY
TITUS STREGA-BORGIA—thirteen-year-old hero
PANDORA STREGA-BORGIA —nearly eleven-year-old heroine
DAMP STREGA-BORGIA —their two-year-old sister
SIGNOR LUCIANO AND SIGNORA BACI STREGA-BORGIA —parents of the above
STREGA-NONNA (AMELIA)—great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother
(cryogenically preserved) of Titus, Pandora, and Damp
SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY—The unborn baby Strega-Borgia
DON LUCIFER DI S’EMBOWELLI BORGIA —evil half brother to Luciano
MALVOLIO DI S’ENCHANTEDINO BORGIA —Strega-Nonna’s grandson
APOLLONIUS “THE GREEK” BORGIA —mapmaker, cartographer, great-great etcetera
THE GOOD HELP THAT WAS HARD TO FIND
MRS. FLORA MCLACHLAN—nanny to Titus, Pandora, and Damp
LATCH—StregaSchloss butler
MARIE BAIN—possibly the worst cook in the Western Hemisphere
MISS ARAMINTA FRASER—new nanny to Titus, Pandora, and Damp
THE BEASTS
TARANTELLA—spider with attitude, and now, family
NOVELLA, EPISTOLIA, ANECDOTA, TRILOGIA, EPICSAGA, EMAILIA, DIARYA—daughters
of the above
SAB, FFUP, NESTOR, AND KNOT—mythical dungeon beasts
TOCK—crocodile inhabitant of StregaSchloss’s downstairs bathroom
MULTITUDINA AND TERMINUS—free-range StregaSchloss rats
THE SLEEPER—Scottish unreconstructed-male mythical beast
ORYNX—salamander and unwilling slave
VESPER—Damp’s bat familiar
ASSORTED MEMBERS OF THE CAST
RAND MACALISTER HALL—member of Titus’s band
MUNRO MACALISTER HALL —hideously expensive lawyer and Rand’s father
LUDO GRABBIT—estate lawyer from Slander, Defame, and Grabbit, W. S.
DETECTIVE SERGEANT BILL WATERS—CID sergeant
DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR FINBAR MCINTOSH—senior CID officer
THE IMMORTALS
ISAGOTH—demonic defense minister and castaway
S’TAN—First Minister of the Hadean Executive
DEATH—as himself
THE CHEF—angelic being from the Other Side
UNIDENTIFIED MAN SURVIVES STORMS
Argyll Police are endeavoring to establish the identity of a man found unconscious on the western shores of Lochnagargoyle. Thought to be aged between forty-five and fifty, the man was wearing a black Gore-tex jacket with battered chinos over a pair of lace-up paratrooper’s boots. His unconscious body was found by local fisherman Archie McIntoul during the early hours of Wednesday morning.
LUCKY TO BE ALIVE
“It’s a miracle he’s not dead,” said Mr. McIntoul, whose speedy intervention probably saved the life of this unidentified man.
“I saw something on the shore when I was hauling in my creels, so I motored over to investigate.” The fisherman’s lobster boat Time and Tide has been a familiar sight sailing up and down Lochnagargoyle for the past forty years.
MAN’S BODY SHOCK
“Imagine my shock when I realized that it was a man’s body lying there,” said Mr. McIntoul (sixty-three). “In all my years of fishing on this loch, I’ve never seen anything like this. His face was all covered in wee red spots and the way he was lying made me scared to move him, so I covered him with my jacket and radioed for assistance.”
RAPID RESPONSE FROM HMS COAST GUARD
Within a very short time, the man was airlifted to the local hospital in Auchenlochtermuchty, where nursing staff confirm that he is out of danger but still unconscious. Moments after arriving at the hospital, surgeons operated to save the man’s legs, which had both been broken in several places.
BAFFLED
Hospital sources admit that they have no idea how this man could have survived prolonged exposure in subzero temperatures. Police are asking any witnesses to this incident to come forward.
Memento Mori
At four o’clock on the afternoon of the first of October, police cars drew up at each of the three main gates to the StregaSchloss estate and effectively cordoned off the area.
As a further precaution, a launch sped up Lochnagargoyle, cut its engines, and dropped anchor just out of sight of the StregaSchloss jetty. Radios cra
ckled, then fell silent as moments ticked by, marked by the rain drumming on the roofs of the police cars and turning their windshields opaque.
Inside the cars the policemen waited for the rain to stop, enviously imagining what it would be like to have so much money that you could afford to live in a huge house like StregaSchloss.
“How many did you say, Detective Sergeant?”
“Fifty-six chimneys, sir.”
There StregaSchloss lay, its turrets and chimneys thrust aggressively into the sky; a vast, unattainable, immeasurably expensive chunk of real estate bigger than all the policemen’s houses put together.
“Surely that rust bucket can’t be their only car, Detective Sergeant?”
“ ’Fraid so, sir—apart from the butler’s wee Japanese jobbie.”
Outside StregaSchloss, parked on the rose-quartz drive, was the Strega-Borgia family car, badly in need of a wash and bearing a scrawl to this effect on its rear window. With a pair of high-powered binoculars the DCI could just about decipher the message:
Pure Dead mingin’—please wash me
In Titus’s opinion a wash was not enough. He’d written this considered criticism on the car’s rear window months ago, but it had failed to bring results: the car still hadn’t been washed, and a season spent hauling Titus and his sister Pandora back and forth along a rutted muddy track hadn’t improved the car’s general state of decrepitude. Nor had his little sister Damp’s habit of littering all the car’s internal horizontal surfaces with a combination of peanut butter, glitter, and a selection of the dried-up furry bits from the insides of several disemboweled felt pens. No, Titus thought, a grin appearing on his face, a wash was not what their car required. It needed some kind soul to disengage the hand brake, put the gears in neutral, and push the car straight into the moat, where, with luck, it would vanish from sight into the deep mud at the bottom—the same forgiving mud that had swallowed so many unwanted things over the years.
Then they could buy a decent car. Something fast. Something sleek and powerful. Something—Titus’s smile faded—something highly unsuitable for a family of two adults and three children, plus another one due to appear round about Christmas. By which time the parents would either tie Titus and Pandora to the roof rack to make room for the new baby or go and buy something truly hideous with buslike rows of industrial seating, the motor equivalent of an elastic band under the hood, and a name that would make Titus cringe every time the parents referred to it. Like, er: “Go and get my bag out of the Nipply, would you, darling”; or, “I think I’d better get gas for the Sopha while I’m in town”; or even, shudder, shudder, “Yeah, but it’s not as big as our Urse TDi.”
Still, Titus decided, anything, even an Urse TDi, had to be better than having to walk to Auchenlochtermuchty. He hardly noticed when several wet figures ran across the rose quartz and applied themselves to the front doorbell with great urgency. Had he not been quite so preoccupied, Titus might have spotted that two of the scurrying figures were dressed in identical damp black serge with checkerboard detail round the epaulettes: the uniform of the Argyll and Bute Police.
Meanwhile, in his bedroom in the attic, the StregaSchloss butler, Latch, was not enjoying an afternoon nap. He’d spent the hours since lunchtime trying to evict a bat. In vain had he opened skylights and made shooing noises; unsurprisingly, given the rain outside, the bat was having none of it. Latch had no desire to harm the little creature, but he most emphatically didn’t want to share the same room. After several abortive attempts to flap it out of the window using a pillowcase as propellant, Latch had given up and was now sitting on his bed, trying to reason with the intruder. The bat hung upside down from the lampshade and ignored him.
“Look,” Latch said, “it’s dead simple. This is my cave, not yours. The only person I want to share it with lies fathoms deep at the bottom of Lochnagargoyle, and frankly you, pal, are no substitute. Though undoubtedly heaven-sent, the love of my life had no visible wings and definitely wasn’t covered in black fur.”
The bat blinked and extended one leathery wing.
“Please,” Latch said, blowing his nose and wiping his eyes, “leave me alone. Go and do your bat-thing somewhere else. You remind me of death—as if I needed reminding.” He closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of the spartan bedroom; a room that bore no evidence of anything other than solitary bachelorhood and utter loneliness. There were no photographs, no letters, nothing to show for the love he’d found and lost. Even his memory of her was dimming as the days without her ticked by; days he spent scanning the loch shore, willing the water to return her to him, his mermaid, his selkie, his loved and lost Flora.
The bat extended both wings and cleared his throat with a discreet cough. “I hate to intrude on your grieving, sir,” he whispered. “Forgive me for interrupting. I’m not looking for you, actually. Any chance you could point me toward the witch?”
He waited, refolding his wings like organic origami, his pale eyes blinking in the fading light.
“The witch?” Latch’s voice emerged as a strangled squeak.
“The real witch,” the bat insisted. “Not the big one, nor the medium one, but the little one—oh, whatsername: Wet? Clammy? Moist?”
“Damp,” Latch said. “Down eight flights of stairs, hang a left, and third door on the right along the corridor.”
“Damp,” the bat said in an awed voice. “D-aaaaammmmmmp.”
“Indeed,” said Latch, his tone indicating that his patience was running out alongside the bat’s welcome. To further this impression he opened the door leading onto the attic corridor, and stepped back to allow the uninvited guest to make his exit unimpeded.
“I’m much obliged,” the bat squeaked, unfolding one wing after the other and giving both a good shake. “Really sorry about your sad loss.”
“Quite,” muttered Latch. He turned aside and crossed the room to stand gazing sightlessly out the window; as clear a signal as one could wish for that the conversation, such as it was, had come to an end. When his swimming eyes were able to focus once more, he realized that the distant white blob parked across the north gate to StregaSchloss was a police car, but by then it was too late.
The table in the StregaSchloss kitchen was heavily dusted with flour along its entire length, as were the motley assortment of kitchen chairs, the shelves and crockery on the cupboard, the hotplates of the range, the flagstone floor, and every horizontal surface within a five-meter range of where Ffup the teenage dragon was holding a one-sided conversation with something deeply unpleasant in the bottom of a mixing bowl.
“Come on,” she begged. “Upsa-daisy—arise arise—allez oopla—hey ho and up she rises.” The dragon closed her eyes, held her breath for a count of ten, and then peered hopefully into the bowl where, to her disgust, her diet-approved no-carbohydrate bread dough still lay irretrievably lumpen, stubbornly inert, and flatly unrisen.
“Rrrrright,” she muttered. “Time for desperate measures. I’m desperate and you’re not measuring up to your picture in my recipe book. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Brushing flour from his leathery hide and pulling a hideous face behind his fellow beast’s back, Sab the griffin dropped his newspaper onto the table and sighed pointedly. “What are you on about, woman? I can’t think loud enough to drown out your insane mumblings. Tell me, why are you talking to a mixing bowl?”
There was a subdued whumph like an underpowered firework; then the kitchen filled with the smell of burnt offerings. Ffup burst into tears, hurled the red-hot bowl into the sink, and fled to the kitchen garden. In the ensuing silence there was a hissing sound as the bowl rapidly cooled down in the washing-up water, followed by a long ring from the front doorbell.
“More interruptions,” growled Sab, rattling the pages of his paper. “Get that, would you, Tock?” The griffin absentmindedly shredded a ballpoint pen as he considered the horoscope page, wrinkling his leathery forehead with annoyance as some thoughtless visitor rang the doorbell agai
n. Where was that crocodile? “Tock?”
“The crocodile is out,” said a languid voice from somewhere on top of the cupboard. “He is a not-in reptile. He’s gone see-you-later-alligator. He’s in an ongoing in-a-while-crocodile situation.” The voice paused and its owner gave a deep sigh. “Actually, he’s dredging the bottom of the river Chrone for quartz pebbles. Remember? Tock’s moat renovations? He wanted lapis lazuli, but that was going to cost more than the house, so he had to downsize to quartz—” The voice broke off and emitted an exasperated “Tchhhh,” and when it spoke again, the sound came from nearer the floor.
“Though why,” it continued, its tone becoming increasingly shrill, “why anyone would see fit to construct a quartz-lined channel and then fill it with w-wa—Oh, Lordy, I can hardly bring myself to pronounce the word, let alone think of it—fill a quartz-lined channel with water—gag, urk, yeurrrch—is quite beyond my understanding.”
This last comment was delivered at a deafening volume; then, apparently exhausted by the effort of projecting her voice so far, the owner limped across Sab’s field of vision and dangled herself from his ruined ballpoint, positioning her tennis-ball-sized abdomen between the griffin and his newspaper.
“What star sign am I, then? Hmmm? Go on, guess”—the voice emerging from the tarantula’s cherry-red mouthparts was once again languid, chilled, and ever so faintly smug—“oh, come on, team. You do know this one.”
“I have no idea,” Sab muttered. “I didn’t even know spiders had star signs.”
“Rrreally.” Tarantella narrowed all her eyes simultaneously. “Well, you live and learn, huh? What did you think we had? Serial numbers? Bar codes?”
“Don’t be so touchy.” Sab returned to the study of his paper, running a talon along the list of horoscopes and, to Tarantella’s annoyance, ignoring her completely.
“For your information, I was born on a cusp,” she hissed, her mouthparts snapping shut after delivering this nugget of information.