‘Hold on,’ said Winchflat. ‘If you want twins we need one more thing.’
‘What’s that, my darling boy?’ said Mordonna.
‘A mirror.’
So, in the end, the machine was built in the porcelain sink in the upstairs bathroom, underneath the vanity mirror. Winchflat put the finishing touches to his invention, then Nerlin lit the blue touchpaper and ran away.
There was a quiet explosion and when the smoke had cleared the sink was no longer full of toilet rolls and miscellaneous objects but was overflowing with twin baby boys. The two boys looked at each other and gurgled, one morbidly, the other silently. Mordonna and Nerlin knew exactly what to call them.
Later the whole family sat on the back verandah, drinking warm blood slurpies as the ice-cold moon rose over the trees and illuminated the funeral lilies on Queen Scratchrot’s grave.
‘One more,’ said Mordonna.
‘Another slurpie, dearest?’ said Nerlin.
‘No, darling. One more baby,’ said Mordonna. ‘A nice sweet little girl.’
‘Just because the Sheman said we would have seven children doesn’t mean we have to,’ said Nerlin. ‘Everyone knows that Shemans are rubbish at numbers.’
‘That could mean we have fifteen children,’ said Mordonna.
Nerlin went as white as the funeral lilies. The colour even drained away from his blood slurpie. He was quiet for a while.
‘I suppose one more wouldn’t hurt,’ he said finally. ‘After all, we seem to have given your father’s agents the slip. It’s safe here.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mordonna. ‘I want a pretty little girl and not one made in a jam jar or a cellar.’
‘OK, my darling.’
‘I think that then,’ said Mordonna, ‘life would probably be perfect.’
49
Back in Transylvania Waters, Prince Nochyn of Battenberg and his entire family of sixty-three relations had arrived for the Prince’s grand wedding to Princess Mordonna.
The King tried to stall them in the hope that the Hearse Whisperer would bring her back, but after six months, he had to admit the truth. He also had to admit that he had spent the deposit he’d been given and couldn’t pay it back.
Prince Nochyn’s father was furious and threatened to declare war on Transylvania Waters unless his honour was satisfied.
‘I have another daughter,’ said the King hopefully.
Howler entered the room, and it was love at first sight – but only from Howler’s point of view. Prince Nochyn didn’t want to catch a second sight of her, so he jumped out the window and ran away. Howler was about to go and live in a remote cave and give up all hope of love and happiness when something crawled out of number seven cesspit at the sewage works and winked at her. But that is another story.
‘You will be hearing from our solicitors,’ said the King of Battenberg, ‘and our very big noisy guns.’
But that is another story too.
FOOTNOTES
1 Actually, I don’t live in an ordinary street in an ordinary town. I live near the Never Never River in a valley called The Promised Land. If you don’t believe me, read about the area at http://www.bellingen.com.
2 The only humans there have been kidnapped from the outer world to be kept as pets by very rich witches.
3 The King’s full title is eighteen pages long and includes words from fifteen different languages. This makes ceremonial occasions in Transylvania Waters long, dreary affairs because it can take hours just to read his name out. In this book we will call him King Quatorze for short.
4 The longest distance anyone has ever water-skied on Lake Tarnish is fifteen metres. The record holder wore a very thick rubber suit and skied twelve of the metres on land before entering the water. On moonlit nights the surface of the lake is lit with an eerie glow. It is the radioactive light from the bones of past water-skiers.
5 There really is a mushroom called the Destroying Angel and it is SERIOUSLY poisonous.
6 What Mordonna had been trying to say was ‘Leak’, which was what her nappy had been doing, but as she was looking at the bird when she said it, everyone had assumed that she had been trying to talk to it.
7 Yes, yes, I know it’s not a proper word, but I like it and you know what it means.
8 If you want to be a writer, here is a tip. Keep your eyes and brain open. I invented the batroom when I typed bathroom with a letter missing by mistake.
9 An equery is an equerry who asks a lot of questions.
10 Except, of course, for the hole that Mordonna had fallen down, though the King had since filled that in with ten tonnes of concrete.
11 Or, as it was known in the drains, dinner.
12 Only one, because her right eye always faced magnetic north.
13 The King’s back was as smooth and lovely as a half-rotted hippopotamus’s armpit. While the King hung on to the bath taps and shut his eyes, the Queen scrubbed him down with an angry porcupine on a very long stick. It was something she wouldn’t miss when she ran away.
14 Have you ever wondered why these strange dwarf cabbages are named after the capital of Belgium? No, neither have I.
15 Transylvania Waters Castle is so big that there are over eighty-seven kitchens. Apart from the obvious Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc, kitchens that lots of people have, there are Christmas kitchens and kitchens for all the other special holidays like Blood-Letting Day. There are kitchens where special foods like vampire bat bladders are cooked and there are superstitious kitchens like the Friday the Thirteenth Kitchen.
16 It should be pointed out here that George had actually been Prince Kevin of Assisi and had been turned into a donkey by an ancestor of Queen Scratchrot, who had needed something to carry large amounts of gold he had stolen from El Banco Nationale of Assisi. George was to all intents and purposes a real donkey, except that he could still talk. ‘I don’t like it’ was his favourite phrase.
17 Like Great Britain only worse.
18 A pink skin-coloured slug – The Transylvanian Misery – had evolved just to eat that mould.
19 Another reason was that they had caused all the other possible six and seven star spies to become dead.
20 I wanted to say he sniffed a pair of their undies, but this is supposed to be a children’s book so I’m not allowed to.
21 Don’t think because the castle has a gift shop and I said there were no tourists in Transylvania Waters that I have made a mistake. The gift shop was there to supply passing citizens, who were forced inside at gunpoint and not allowed out until they had bought something.
22 Transylvanian budgies are just the same as the green Australian ones except they’re black, and speak with a Transylvanian accent. They also swear a lot less than their Australian cousins.
23 There is a rest home for laughed-at whippets in Transylvania Waters where the poor creatures are put on red velvet cushions and played all the Enya CDs one after the other. This wouldn’t work with bulldogs, who would rather be laughed at.
24 Except for the bit the witch had been sitting on, which would be warm.
25 Great-Grandfather Formaldehyde had the girls falling at his feet too, mostly because they fainted in horror when they saw him.
26 On Howlcatraz the Hearse Whisperer’s parents were happier than they had ever been. They organised a gardening club and a folk club and a soya-bean embroidery club. Every time there was any talk of them getting parole and being sent home, they got drunk on gooseberry wine and smashed a few windows to ensure they were kept there.
27 The Skeletals – Gorge, Prowl, Stinko and Beryl – were Transylvania Waters’ most famous pop group. In fact, they were Transylvania Waters’s only pop group. The Hearse Whisperer, of course, hated them all.
28 Of course she could have caused even more distress by becoming a physics teacher, but they didn’t have them in Transylvania Waters’ schools.
29 Just to illustrate how dull, damp and totally crap the weather is in Transylvania Waters, the weather forecast was
recorded fifty years ago and has been played on TV every night since then. Basically, an old wizard points at a grey sheet of paper and says: ‘That’s tomorrow’s weather. It could brighten up by the weekend but probably won’t.’
30 Budgie-flavoured crisps are the most popular flavour in Transylvania Waters.
31 Most of Vessel’s mother was not terribly bright but her knee was incredibly talented and carried all the wisdom of the ancient Buddhas, including how to run really fast and cook rice without it all sticking together.
32 About 0.005 Australian dollars.
33 If you are Belgian, please don’t take this personally. Every time you see the word Belgian, just pretend it says ‘Welsh’. If you are Welsh, don’t come to me for sympathy. What do you expect if you insist on wearing silly hats with torches on?
34 The French have a reputation, created entirely by the French, for fine food. This includes croissants, which are tiny amounts of pastry holding massive amounts of fat, frogs’ legs, snails, and tiny wild birds full of little bones and no meat. And as for accordions, a famous Irish writer once said, ‘The only good thing about bagpipes is that they don’t smell too.’ The same can be said of accordions.
35 Needless to say, the Transylvania Waters Navy is not a career many people choose. Those who do are instantly promoted to the rank of Admiral and awarded a long-service medal two days later.
36 An albatross is a huge seabird with an enormous wingspan that can stay at sea for months on end. It is named after the famous Welsh explorer Albert Ross, who also had a shelf in Antarctica and a door handle in Cardiff named after him.
37 There were two more whales coughing, but they were eighty-five kilometres away and therefore out of earshot. It is a well-known scientific fact that you can’t hear a whale cough unless it is less than eighty-four kilometres away and only then if the sea is dead calm.
38 Don’t try this at home. It only works if you are a wizard, otherwise you just end up with a sticky mess.
39 Published every thirteen days by Haphazard Quarters at 17 Dripping Goat Lane, Big Town, Transylvania Waters. Annual subscription – three gold sovereigns plus one litre of blood.
40 Except they didn’t get attacked by wood-borers like logs often do.
41 Visit http://www.tristandc.com to find out more wonderful facts about Tristan da Cunha, including the annual ratting day, when a prize is given for the longest rat tail of the day. You can even join the Tristan da Cunha Association. I know I have. You will also discover that there really is a place there called ‘Potato Patches’.
42 The reason wizards and witches are terrified of Acacias is so secret that even I don’t know it, and if I do ever find out, I won’t be able to tell you because if I do I’ll have to kill you.
43 Like getting the bus down to the shops and window shopping and having to talk to salesmen in cheap suits trying to pretend their solid oak furniture was not actually made out of recycled cardboard.
44 Not quite sure why the Queen got toothbrushes because all witches and wizards have a very small vampire beetle that cleans their teeth while they are asleep – click here for more information at the back of the book.
45 Not only must you NEVER try this at home, you must NEVER try it anywhere else either.
46 Sort of like an internet connection, but instead of messages being carried by phone lines and satellites, they are carried down little tunnels by nits on the back of trained millipedes.
47 The wizard version of a tadpole.
48 Which just goes to show how smart he was.
49 Because this book has a Prologue at the beginning, it has to have an Epilogue at the end or else it won’t balance properly.
The Floods 1: Neighbours
The youngest child in the Flood family, Betty, is a pretty little girl, who looks quite normal – unlike some of her brothers and sisters. She goes to the normal primary school down the road and she even has a normal best friend, Ffiona Hulbert.
But Betty is not normal – she is a witch. When Bridie McTort, the school bully, starts throwing her weight around, Betty knows exactly what to do. And when Ffiona’s dad gets bullied at work, Betty knows how to fix that too.
Meanwhile, Winchflat Flood has been watching old Frankenstein movies and has decided he wants to build a human of his own…
OUT NOW!
The Floods 4: Survivor
It was a dark and moonless night and in the blackness something stirred…
There’s been a murder at Quicklime College and the world’s most famous Forensic Special Investigator, Grusom, has been sent to investigate. With the help of his super-smart new assistant, Avid, and a can of magic beans, Grusom unearths the clues that will help him find the murderer. In no time, he has five suspects. Their names are Winchflat, Morbid, Silent, Merlinmary and Satanella Flood…
Will the Floods be able to stay hidden from the law – and from the evil enemy who is secretly following their every move – until they can prove their innocence?
OUT NOW!
The Floods 5: Prime Suspect
The Floods
HOW TO LIVE FOREVER
Floods 3 Page 10
