by Debi Gliori
“Titus,” he squeaked, “get Latch. Now.” And turning back to the policemen, he tried to smile innocently at his would-be captors, especially the weasel-faced blond one with the gratingly nasal Glaswegian accent and the hand that gripped his shoulder with quite unnecessary force. “Please.” Luciano laid his hand on top of the policeman’s. “Officer, there’s no need for that. I’ll come with you willingly. Answer all your questions. I’m an innocent man. I have nothing to fear—”
“Are you Luciano Perii Strega-Borgia, owner-occupier of StregaSchloss House, Lochnagargoyle, Auchenlochtermuchty, Argyll and Bute?” This was from the middle-aged policeman who’d made an earlier attempt to read him his rights. Irrelevantly, Luciano noticed that he’d missed a patch of gray bristle on his jawbone last time he’d shaved. And his mouth was moving, lips drawn back, teeth in shadow as the unbelievable words—lies and slanders—spilled forth.
“You are charged with the murder of the following …”
Names, a list of people, most of whom he’d never heard of, until, like a blurred picture coming into focus, Luciano began to recognize words, names, and started to see faces appear in the lens of his memory.
“… Vadette Kyle, Vincent Bella-Vista …”
Luciano almost smiled. This was ridiculous. He remembered them. A local builder and his girlfriend. Luciano had been in bed with Baci, staying in a hotel, with witnesses, three miles away, when they’d met their unfortunate ends—
“… Hugh Pylum-Haight, Ffion Fforbes-Campbell …”
Heavens, were they dead too? What a lot of murders they were trying to pin on him. On him? Ridiculous. What a waste of police time this was all turning out to be. He’d soon prove his innocence—or was that wrong? Wasn’t he, Luciano Perii Strega-Borgia, innocent until proven guilty? Hah, he thought belligerently, just let them try.
Then, as if someone had pulled Luciano’s plug, all his confidence and righteousness flooded away, leaving him beached, stranded, and very afraid. One name was all it took.
“… Mrs. Flora McLachlan.” The DS stood back and folded up the warrant for Luciano’s arrest, using the fingernails of his thumb and index finger to give the document a wholly unnecessary knife-edge crease. He looked up, and across his face flashed an expression of utter contempt for Luciano and everything that he stood for.
Luciano entered free fall. “But … but … no, NO, this is wrong,” he wailed, clinging to coat stands, door handles, stone statuary, and suits of armor, abandoning all dignity as the policemen dragged him out of his house. His ears filled with a static hiss as he rolled past his white-faced son, and he felt his balance shift and tilt as he was dragged outside to the waiting car. Too late he saw Latch running toward him, the butler’s long face made even more cadaverous by the police car’s blue light, which was bathing the south face of StregaSchloss in its cold flash of alarm. Bundled into the backseat, Luciano began to weep hopelessly as Latch disappeared behind the rapidly accelerating car.
In a slew of rose quartz, the car skidded away down the drive, hurtled along the track, and was soon no more than a twin-beamed light below a flashing blue pulse; then it was swallowed up by darkness.
A Man Betrayed
Supper that night was a somber affair; even if it had been edible, no one would have had much appetite for it. Baci dabbed her eyes with a shredded tissue and sniffed continuously until, in a rare moment of parent-child role-reversal, Pandora passed her mother a paper towel and muttered, “Don’t sniff. Blow.”
Pale and silent, Titus for once didn’t demand pudding, nor did he tilt his chair backward until it crashed into the dresser when he stood up. He even cleared the table, stacked the dishes, and began to wash up without being asked.
“Titus …” Baci’s voice wobbled. “Darling, leave those. They’re Marie Bain’s job.”
Titus ignored this, reasoning that he was there, in the kitchen, while Marie—
“Where is that woman?” Baci stood up, pushing her chair away from the table with such force that it crashed backward into the dresser.
Pandora looked up from the table; she’d been repeatedly stabbing a rubbery oven french fry into a pile of tomato ketchup and using it to polka-dot her plate with little daubs of scarlet condiment. “Who cares?” she said under her breath. “She can’t cook either.”
“MARIEEEEEEE!” Baci roared, causing Titus to upend an extravagant quantity of green washing-up liquid into the sink. Sighing mightily, he added a torrent of hot water from the tap, with spectacular results.
“Pretty,” Damp decided; she slid off the pile of lumpy cushions that brought her up to table height, and wobbled over to the sink to examine Titus’s bubble fest.
Baci swept across the kitchen radiating ire. “Today of all days,” she spat, dragging open the door. “Not only am I forced to cook dinner, but we’re expected to clear up afterward? Why do we employ a cook? Where is she? This isn’t her day off. MARIE! This is simply not on. Not only is she an absolutely rotten cook—”
Out of Baci’s earshot, Pandora gasped, clutched her chest theatrically, and rolled her eyes at Titus, who whispered, “Do the words pot, kettle, and black ring any bells with you?”
Baci meanwhile disappeared into the gloom of the corridor and then came a slow thump-slither, thump-slithering sound, as if something very large and heavy was dragging itself downstairs. Thuuuump-slither, thummmmmp-slither—and then came their mother’s voice: at first precise and icy—her Siberian-wind-chill, her nothing-can-withstand-this-temperature-and-live, her don’t-mess-with-me-pal voice; the one she always used when she was assured of being right. The thumping sound speeded up—thumpthump-slither-thumpthump—and now Baci’s inflection thawed somewhat; held the promise of ice melting; snowdrops poking through snowdrifts; an I’m-sure-we-can-come-to-some-agreement-or-else kind of tone.
A look passed between Titus and Pandora, and as one they crossed the kitchen to eavesdrop at the open door, leaving Damp sploshing happily in the soapily enhanced washing-up.
“Marie, come now, I’m sure we can work something out. Please? I need your help. Especially since Signor Strega-Borgia has been temporarily … detained. Here, let me help you back upstairs with your suitcase.”
There were more thumps now, and the unmistakable sounds of a struggle.
“Non, non, my mind ees make up. I go now, seenyora. Pliss to leave my valise alone.”
“Marie. What has come over you? Whatever is the matter? Is it money? Do we need to review your salary? When Signor Strega-Borgia returns I’m sure we can come to some arrangement about an increase, a bonus—if you could just wait until my husband is released, then we—”
“Non. Ees amposseeble. I ’ave, how do you say zis, grassed heem up, non?”
“I’m not sure I underst—”
“Monsieur Borgia. Eet was I who telephone the gendarmes. It was I who tell to zem your husband has keeled all zose—”
“Marie?” Baci’s voice had shrunk, lost several decades of sophistication and elocution, and emerged as the raw howl of an abandoned child. “Marieeeeeeee. Nooooo … Ohhhh, help …”
Titus and Pandora rushed to her assistance, leaving their little sister unattended in the kitchen. Damp blinked, seized a spoon, and spun it wildly above her head. The bubbles in the washing-up bowl rose to the ceiling like a tornado, twisting upward, spinning faster and faster until the soapy spiral began to bulge and distort, breaking free as Damp tried to summon the best help she could think of. In the center of the blizzard of bubbles the faintest shape of a woman appeared, albeit briefly. Flora McLachlan, conjured in soap bubbles, looking as if she lived in a snow dome. The phantom nanny opened her arms wide and Damp leaned forward, eyes wide open, words tumbling from her mouth.
“Not say ba-bye. Not go away.”
For one brief, blissful instant she was embraced in warm arms, fell into the softness of a pillowy chest, was surrounded by a fading scent of lavender … and then, as if by design, the bubbles all burst at once, making Damp wail as soa
p stung her eyes and her mouth filled with the bitter taste of detergent. Coughing and sobbing, she abandoned her attempt to conjure up a soapy phantom and ran for the flesh-and-blood comforts of her family.
Baci clutched Marie Bain’s arm in a desperate attempt to delay the cook’s departure, to understand what madness had overcome her, but to no avail.
“Ees no good you crying,” the cook hissed. “I ees going now. I not vish to stay in zis house weeth a murrrrderrrrrerrrrr’s famille. You all evil, here. You keep vild animaux een your basement. You ees all insane. Who knows, maybe I be your next veectim, moi. Maybe eef I not go, zey find my bones in ze mud at ze bottom of ze—ze—laichh.”
“Loch,” muttered Pandora.
“Lake,” Titus corrected.
“MOAT!” yelled Baci. “Oh my God. Tell me you didn’t say to the police that Luciano buried his victims at the bottom of the moat? Oh, you stupid woman. What have you done?”
“I haff told ze truth.” Silhouetted in the light now spilling from the downstairs bathroom, Marie Bain stood beside her outsized suitcase, her shoulders hunched and her head swiveling from side to side like a cornered animal wondering from which direction death would strike.
“Shall I just toast her now and have done with it?” demanded Ffup, appearing behind the twitching cook. The dragon loomed over Marie Bain, her slowly unfolding wings adding a whole new dimension of menace to the tableau of cook and would-be cremater. The cook turned a ghastly shade of gray and staggered against her suitcase.
“Or … um … I could just asphyxiate her,” Knot said, emerging from the bathroom with a look of faint apology on the woolly expanse of matted fur that passed for a face among his fellow yetis.
“AAAAAAAAND, if all else fails,” roared Sab, dropping out of the skies and flapping down to tower over the stone steps beyond the front door, retracting his wings with a finality that boded ill for the now-sobbing Marie Bain, “I could just remove her head from her worthless body and slam-dunk it in the loch.”
“Just GO!” Baci screamed. “Get out. You faithless, betraying, lying—”
The cook needed no further invitation. She fled out of the house, half fell, half ran down the stone steps, and vanished sobbing into the darkness. One minute later, to everyone’s immense satisfaction, they heard her fall into the moat with a loud splash.
Familiarly Damp
Damp waited until the schlep-schlepp of Baci’s mules had died away down the corridor before she opened her eyes. Despite having sobbed inconsolably for more than an hour following her attempt to reincarnate Mrs. McLachlan in soap bubbles, and even after having had a grand total of five picture books read to her by assorted members of the family and beasts, and notwithstanding the soporific effects of a bath laced with chamomile oil, Damp was still horribly awake.
Adults have a number of strategies lined up for those long dark nights when sleep is impossible and melancholy moves in to take its place. Had she been a grown-up, Damp might have abandoned any hope of sleep and crept downstairs to the kitchen for the comfort of hot chocolate and a brainless best seller, or even a stiff nightcap followed by a couple of pages of the writings of long-dead Roman philosophers. However, at only two and a half years old she had little choice but to lie awake in the dark and wonder when she might stop feeling sad. Damp didn’t really understand the workings of time yet. She’d heard mention made of years, but if you’ve only been in the world for two and a half years, the concept of a period of time that encompassed almost half your life was—well, it was forever. Or half of forever, which is still an awfully long time. “Soon” and “later” and “hang on a minute” and “in two ticks” were equally incomprehensible when all you wanted to hear was “yes, right now.” The past was “once upon a time,” the future was “in a little while” or “tomorrow,” but to Damp, only “now, right here and now” was real.
And, in Damp’s opinion, right here and right now was really awful. Her eyes stung from soap and from crying so hard. Her head throbbed in time to her heartbeat. She was too hot, so she kicked off the quilt; then she began to shiver as the cold air dried her tears. Once upon a time there had been Mrs. McLachlan’s warm arms to hold her, gentle hands to stroke her cheek, and a soft voice murmuring lullabies and stories to soothe her to sleep …
… there had been lavender water and ironed linen sheets … teddies stacked neatly on shelves, holes in tights mended, and books and toys put away at the end of the day. There had been laughter and jokes, sunshine spilling in squares of gold onto the lemon-waxed nursery floor, light caught in spinning prisms in the window and scattering rainbows across the walls and ceiling. There had been nursery teas by the fire, toast fingers, soft-boiled eggs, and homemade cakes. Downstairs had smelled of fresh bread, vanilla, and lemons.…
A sob caught in Damp’s throat. Now StregaSchloss smelled rank. Like mold. Like slimy autumn leaves and old drains. Latch still lit the nursery fire every day, but no one had the heart to unearth the toasting fork, or to soft-boil the eggs for tea. For some unaccountable reason the range in the kitchen appeared to be sulking, and consequently Pandora’s cakes either failed to rise or suffered such overleavening that they flowed out of their pans and turned to carbon on the oven floor. Lemons rotted in the fruit bowl; Titus spilled the vanilla essence and no one thought to replace it; freshly baked bread became a fading memory. In the dwindling light of autumn there wasn’t even enough morning sunshine to set the rainbows spangling across the nursery.
Damp rolled on her side and stared at her bedroom floor—what little she could see of it beneath a tangle of discarded toys. Fuzzy felt and glitter speckled the floorboards like infant confetti thrown for the bizarre marriage of headless Barbie to legless Action Man. Also present were assorted Sylvanian Family members in varying states of undress, a selection of antique teddy bears with matted fur and mites, and a small velvet dog with a well-chewed foot—an item that bore evidence of having been loved almost to destruction. In the shadows lay disemboweled felt pens, toothmarked Legos, annoyingly redundant bits of sticky plastic that had once been shoes for small dolls, all of whom now lay footless and naked under Damp’s chest of drawers.
Hanging from the curtains and surveying the chaos, the little bat squinched his wings in closer to his body and shuddered fastidiously. Not only was this new cave a complete pigsty, but his new mistress was leaking. Wet stuff sounds completely different to dry stuff when listened to via echolocation. The bat emitted a series of high-frequency squeaks and then concentrated fiercely. There. Well. That was a relief. Only leaking from one end.
Unaware that she was under surveillance, Damp rolled over, presented her back to the nursery chaos, and turned her face to the wall.
“Whoops, no—” The bat squeaked in alarm. In his experience, when humans turned their faces to the wall, it wasn’t in order to examine the wallpaper. It was a sign of surrender, or losing interest in life; a prelude to death. He panicked—“No! No way, ma’am. Not when I’m on dooty. Code Red. Repeat. Code Red. I’m going in”—and launching himself into space, plummeted from the curtain rail, in his haste unfortunately omitting to unfold his clenched wings before takeoff.
“Mayday, Mayday!” he squawked, tumbling wings over toes, falling in a squeaking, shrieking bundle onto an oversprung ottoman, and from there bouncing straight onto Damp’s bed.
“I’m down!” he yelled, somewhat unnecessarily, his high-pitched shriek just within range of Damp’s hearing. “Okay, team. Here we go. I’m going to try and establish contact with the ur-witch.”
“Go ’way,” Damp muttered, not deigning to turn over and see whatever had flopped onto her bed and was now making noises like something in dire need of a spot of axle grease.
The bat’s eyes glowed and he upped his squeaker volume somewhat. Extending his wings, he heaved a sob of gratitude. “Finally, they unfold—oh, let my joy be unconfined.” Then he hobbled and flapped across the patchwork quilt, scrabbled up onto Damp’s shoulder, wrapped his toes round a lock o
f her hair, and rapelled down to land right on a horribly soggy patch of pillow in front of her face. Understandably, Damp’s eyes widened and her mouth opened in preparation for a good howl, but before she could emit as much as a squeak, the bat wrapped one wing round her lips and said, “Please. No. Ma’am. Don’t. Don’t scream. I come in peace, humanchild.”
Damp blinked, her lips moving under his wing.
“Pardon me, ma’am? Oh, I’m sorry. We haven’t been introduced, and here I am taking liberties with your face. I’m Vesper, at your eternal service. Familiar, friend, and flying consultant.” The bat fluttered away across Damp’s pillow, scrabbled up to the top rail of her bedstead, wrapped his bony toes around it, and effortlessly swung upside down. He dangled from this new perch, apparently unaware that he was sharing it with a pink fun-fur Incy-Wincy and a glow-in-the-dark star.
Damp gazed up at the visitor and Vesper blinked back. He certainly wasn’t the first bat the little girl had encountered; living at StregaSchloss ensured that the Strega-Borgias and their staff were accustomed to meeting small flying creatures navigating the many corridors and stairwells in the house. Indeed, bowls of decomposing fruit were left out as food for the fruit-eating species, and Tarantella regularly donated sundried bluebottles and houseflies for the enjoyment of the insectivorous types. Nor was Damp perplexed by this bat’s command of English: her age group regarded talking animals as hardly worthy of comment; children’s literature leads the young to expect their pets to chat. Nor was she in the least bit frightened at the prospect of sharing her bed with a winged mammal so beloved of the writers of horror movies; fortunately, she was too media-innocent to know that tradition demanded that she now run screaming down a darkened corridor, clutching a guttering candelabrum and pursued by a flapping bat.
