Floods 6

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  The Floods 6: The Great Outdoors

  ePub ISBN 9781864715682

  Kindle ISBN 9781864717037

  This work is fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. If you think one of the characters in this book is like you, then you are very lucky, but remember, it’s not nice to boast.

  A Random House book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Random House in 2008

  Copyright © Colin Thompson 2008

  http://www.colinthompson.com

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Thompson, Colin (Colin Edward).

  The great outdoors.

  For primary school age.

  ISBN 978 174166 253 5 (pbk.).

  I. Title. (Series: Thompson, Colin (Colin Edward) Floods; 6).

  A823.3

  Illustrations by Colin Thompson

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Imprint Page

  The Floods’ Family Tree

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Footnotes

  The Floods Series

  Random House

  How To Live Forever

  The Floods 7: Top Gear

  PLEASE NOTE: No Belgian people were harmed in the making of this book, though several were given moustaches to protect their identity.*

  * But only the women. The men were given magic When-You-Look-At-Me-You-Will-Think-I-Am-Someone-Completely-Different socks.

  For those of you who haven’t already read ANY of the FIVE earlier books:

  Blah, di blah, di blah, di blah and blah and lah, di da, di blah, di blah di blah. Blah, di blah, di blah, di blah and blah and lah, di da, di blah, di blah di blah. Blah, di blah, di blah, di blah and blah and lah, di da, di blah, di blah di blah. Blah, di blah, di blah, di blah and blah and lah, di da, di blah, di blah di blah. Blah, di blah, di blah, di blah and blah and lah, di da, di blah, di blah di blah. Blah, di blah, di blah, di blah and blah and lah, di da, di blah, di blah di blah.

  What, you think I’m going to waste pages and pages writing a summary of, like, five whole books? Just go and get them yourself and read them…

  If you have already read the other books, you are very clever and welcome back.

  After months of surfing the net, looking at hundreds of magazines and watching dozens of TV travel shows, the Floods had finally booked to go on holiday.

  Although Mordonna and Nerlin had sailed around the world when they had eloped from Transylvania Waters, they had never been to the seaside in the way you go to the seaside on holiday, to swim and make sandcastles and lie around getting sunburnt.

  When the idea of a holiday had first been suggested, Winchflat Flood had said they should probably rent a nice remote house somewhere so no one would bother them.

  ‘What you mean,’ said Betty, ‘is so we don’t bother anyone else.’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ Winchflat admitted. ‘I mean, we don’t exactly look like your average human family, do we?’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Mordonna. ‘People do tend to cross the road when we approach and small babies and dogs cry a lot when they see us.’

  Mordonna was preparing the dinner as she spoke. She was knitting several very long worms together to make Wizard Wraps, which were then stuffed with Hot ’N’ Spicy Chilli Warts that she herself had collected from the armpits of a family of hippos at the local zoo.1

  ‘So we should look for a quiet house all on its own next to a nice beach,’ said Nerlin, who was meant to be peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink but kept peeling the ends of his fingers.

  ‘No,’ said Mordonna. ‘I want to stay in a posh hotel where someone opens the door for you and they iron your socks and put chocolates on your pillow every night when they turn down your bed.’

  ‘But I put chocolates on your bed every night already,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘I know, but you always give me the hard ones with the toffee because you eat all the nice ones,’ said Mordonna. ‘No, I want to stay in a big posh seaside hotel with a big posh name like the Grande or the Splendide, where we won’t have to do the washing up and there aren’t spiders living under the beds.’

  ‘You mean we’ll have to take our own spiders?’ said one of the twins.2

  Morbid and Silent were sitting under the kitchen table catching the worms that kept wriggling off Mordonna’s chopping board. For every five they caught they gave four back to their mother and took it in turns eating the fifth one.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Satanella. ‘I expect really posh hotels have a choice of spiders. They might even have scorpions and cockroaches.’

  ‘They don’t mention them on their websites,’ said Winchflat. ‘And humans are frightened of spiders.’

  ‘Frightened of spiders?’ said Satanella, picking another one out of the family snack bowl that lived next to the toaster.3 ‘How can anyone be frightened of spiders? They’re delicious.’

  ‘It’s just another one of those things that make humans so weird,’ said Mordonna.

  Mordonna and Nerlin Flood and their seven children were not going on holiday on their own. Their friends, the Hulberts, who lived three doors away at number 19 Acacia Avenue, were going with them. The Hulberts were most definitely not witches or wizards. They were very, very ordinary, extra-normal human beings. There was Mr and Mrs Hulbert, their daughter, Ffiona, who was Betty’s best friend, and Ffiona’s little brother, Claude, who was in love with Satanella and still at the age where eating earth seemed like a really good idea.4

  The Floods thought that surely the Hulberts, being human, would know all about the sort of things you do on holiday and be able to explain what was so good about sitting on a beach getting sand in all your cracks and creases.

  But Mr and Mrs Hulbert, who were both forty-seven, had never once been to the seaside, not even for a day out as children. Trips to the seaside were fun, and neither Mr nor Mrs Hulbert’s parents did that sort of thing. To them fun was a sin that always ended in tears. They thought that looking at postcards of the seaside could make the blood rush to your head. They had never even stayed in a hotel.

  ‘Those sort of p
laces are not for the likes of us,’ Mrs Hulbert’s father had said when his daughter had asked about them.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Mrs Hulbert’s mother. ‘They are places of sin and wickedness. Now eat your cabbage soup and go and polish your shoes and make sure all your hair pins are pointing in the same direction. Oh dear, but it’s rude to point – I meant to say make sure they’re lying in the same direction … but then it’s wrong to lie, too. So, I mean, well, you know perfectly well what I mean, my girl.’

  Mr Hulbert’s parents had been the same, so it was hardly surprising that the two of them had grown up very timid and old-fashioned. However, since they had met the Floods their lives had changed. Most people would be scared of a family of wizards, but with Mordonna and Betty’s guidance and encouragement, plus some added magic, the Hulberts had realised that they too could have a life.

  Gradually they had become more laid-back. Mrs Hulbert often took the twenty-four hair pins out of her long brown hair and let it hang down over her shoulders, and in the past month Mr Hulbert had spent one hundred and ninety-three hours not wearing a tie.5

  So they weren’t a lot of help when it came to finding out about going away on holiday.

  ‘I saw a programme about holidays on the television,’ said Mrs Hulbert. ‘There was lots of sunshine and people talking in foreign languages and people who were wearing really tiny clothes and lying down in the middle of the day on flat bits of sand by water and then eating strange-looking food in loud noisy places at night.’

  ‘Bikinis, mother,’ said Ffiona. ‘They’re called bikinis.’

  ‘Well, I don’t care what they’re called, I don’t think I want to eat any.’

  ‘No, no,’ Ffiona started to explain. ‘Oh, never mind.’

  ‘I like the sound of the strange-looking food,’ said Satanella. ‘Was there gristle and moving bits?’

  ‘Maybe we could get a book,’ Winchflat suggested. ‘Something like Going On Holiday for Dummies.’

  But they could not find a single book about how to go on holiday.

  ‘I suppose humans are born with the information inside their brains, like birds migrating to warm places for the winter,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘We weren’t,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Well, that’s probably because we already live in a warm place,’ said Betty.

  So in the end they decided they would have a rehearsal. They looked through magazines and holiday brochures and watched a TV series about hotels called Fawlty Towers. Then they made some of the cellars under 11 Acacia Avenue look like the inside of a hotel and they took it in turns to work in the hotel and be the guests. Of course, they hadn’t realised that Fawlty Towers was a comedy series and that most hotels are not run by people who are crazy.

  ‘Are you sure you want to go on holiday?’ said Nerlin after a week where they had all taken it in turns being rude to each other and eating yesterday’s leftovers with carrots that had been boiled to mush.

  Then they went down to the deepest cellars and made a fake seaside with a beach and waves and deckchairs and sandcastles, but because they were almost forty metres below ground level, no amount of magic could make the sun shine and they all turned blue and got nasty colds. This meant they had to take spoonfuls of Old Retchup’s Cure-All, which was actually far worse than any illness it was meant to cure.6

  ‘I think we’re probably not doing this holiday thing right,’ said Mrs Hulbert. ‘I’m sure you’re supposed to enjoy yourself. I think that’s why people have holidays.’

  ‘Yes, and also, you know what they say,’ Mr Hulbert added, ‘a change is as good as a rest.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t agree with that,’ said Nerlin. ‘I changed into a toad once and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as having a nice lie-down.’

  ‘Yes, but don’t forget the time you changed into a feather duster,’ said Mordonna. ‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you? I know I did.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mrs Hulbert. ‘I think it means a change of scene is as good as a rest.’

  ‘Seen? Seen what?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘I think I’ll go on that internet thing and just book us all a holiday somewhere nice,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘There are a couple of things we have to do before we leave,’ said Mordonna after she had booked their holiday and the Hulberts had gone home to pack. ‘First of all, I need volunteers to go out and dig up Granny. We can’t possibly go on holiday without her.’

  You might think that no one would offer to dig up a dead body, but the children loved their granny and they all rushed out into the garden and began digging. Of course, being a dog, Satanella usually did all the digging, but when it was Dead-Granny-Digging-Up, everyone insisted on a turn.

  ‘Be careful, children,’ Mordonna called after them. ‘Granny might be asleep and you know how bits of her can fall off if she gets a sudden shock.’

  Since Queen Scratchrot had been buried, quite a few bits of her had fallen off, even without her getting a shock. At first Mordonna had kept them all in a box under the kitchen sink, but then Winchflat had built a special Dead-Granny-Backpack and all the fallen-off bits were kept in its special mould-proof zip-up pockets.7 At some point in the future the family planned to stick all the bits back together again with the famous Doctor Julian Frankenstein’s Amazing Incredible Two-Pack, Low-Fat Corpse Adhesive,8 but for the moment the Queen was quite happy as she was.

  ‘I like travelling light,’ she said.

  The Dead-Granny-Backpack proved to be extra useful now that the Queen was being dug up to accompany the family on holidays. The children lifted her out of her coffin and folded her up inside the main part of the backpack with her head sticking out of the top so she could see what was going on with her one remaining eye.9

  ‘Oh, how lovely,’ said the Queen when the children told her their plans. ‘I haven’t been on holiday for years. Last time I went it was before I met your grandfather. My parents took me to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. We went on the opening day and because we were royalty, we met Queen Victoria. Prince Albert even kissed me on the cheek. Not this cheek,’ she added, pointing to the left side of her face, ‘the one in the plastic bag in that pocket down there.’

  ‘Well, this time, Granny,’ said Betty, ‘we’re going to the seaside.’

  ‘I’ll need some new clothes,’ said the Queen. ‘A nice sarong and one of those bikini things.’

  ‘Euggh, Granny, I don’t think so,’ said Betty.

  ‘Of course,’ said the Queen with a chuckle, ‘I could always go topless.’

  ‘Ohh, Granny.’

  ‘Well, considering most of my skin has fallen off, I’m topless already,’ said the Queen and she laughed so much that her left knee shot out of the backpack and across the room.

  ‘One thing’s for sure,’ she said as tears of laughter rolled down her one remaining cheek into her shoulder socket, ‘I won’t need any sunscreen.’

  At this the entire family fell about in hysterics.

  ‘You are the best granny in the whole world,’ said Betty as she finished painting the Queen’s seven remaining fingernails with her favourite Rhesus Red nail varnish.

  ‘And you are the prettiest granddaughter,’ said the Queen.

  ‘Do you want to bring Igorina, darling?’ Mordonna asked Winchflat.

  Igorina was the girlfriend that Winchflat had built himself. Although everyone called her his girlfriend, they had never been out on a date together or even kissed each other and the only time Winchflat had held her hand was before he had joined it onto the rest of her body. She was not so much a girlfriend as a zombie, but with less charm and beauty. Winchflat thought of her more like a backup girlfriend in case he couldn’t find a proper one.

  ‘I don’t think so, Mother,’ he said. ‘Apart from the fact that she has terrible table manners,10 she looks so freaky that she scares everyone who sees her, including me.’

  ‘If you’re sure, darling,’ said Mordonna, feeling very reliev
ed.

  Being a witch and having grown up in Transylvania Waters, Mordonna had seen many weird and terrifying creatures, so the sight of Igorina didn’t faze her at all. It was the smell.11 The thought of spending time cooped up with that terrible smell in the shiny red minibus that Mr Hulbert had hired for the week was almost enough to make her cancel the whole holiday.

  Before they left, Mordonna called Parsnip down from the roof. Parsnip was a Transylvanian Crow who belonged to Queen Scratchrot’s devoted manservant, Vessel, who the Hearse Whisperer, an evil spy who worked for Mordonna’s father, the King of Transylvania Waters, had trapped in an enchanted birdcage in an attempt to lure Mordonna out of hiding so she could take her back to the King.12

  ‘Parsnip, my good and faithful bird,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Uh oh, bad stuff coming now,’ said Parsnip. ‘Nice speak always bring bad stuff, Snip-Snip know that.’

  ‘No, really,’ said Mordonna. ‘All I want to say is that we’re going on holiday and we’d like you to keep an eye on things back here.’

  ‘Snip-Snip need holiday,’ said Parsnip.

  ‘Well, when we get back, then you can go on holiday yourself,’ said Mordonna. ‘You could go and visit all your friends.’

  ‘Snip-Snip only got one friend and he trapped in enchanted birdcage,’ said Parsnip. ‘And you said Snip-Snip not to go see him or Worse Hisperer will get you.’

  ‘Well, where do other crows go on their holidays?’

  ‘Not have holidays,’ said Parsnip. ‘Just hang around and eat dead things.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Mordonna. ‘When we get back, you can go off and do that. In the meantime, though, I really need you to look after everything here.’