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  The Floods 1: Neighbours

  ePub ISBN 9781864715736

  Kindle ISBN 9781864716986

  This work is fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Random House Australia 2005

  Copyright © Colin Thompson 2005

  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).

  Neighbours.

  For children aged 8+.

  ISBN 1 74166 073 4.

  ISBN 978 1 74166 073 9.

  I. Title. (Series: Thompson, Colin (Colin Edward) The Floods; 1).

  A823.3

  Illustrations by Colin Thompson

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Imprint Page

  The Floods’ Family Tree

  The Floods

  Here Lies Chapter 1

  Here Lies Chapter 2

  Here Lies Chapter 3

  Here Lies Chapter 4

  Here Lies Chapter 5

  Here Lies Chapter 6

  Here Lies Chapter 7

  Here Lies Chapter 8

  Here Lies Chapter 9

  Here Lies Chapter 10

  Here Lies Chapter 11

  Here Lies Chapter 12

  Here Lies Chapter 13

  Here Lies Chapter 14

  Here Lies Chapter 15

  Here Lies Chapter 16

  Footnotes

  The Flood Family Files

  Granny Flood’s Household Tips

  The Floods 2: Playschool

  The Author file

  How To Live Forever

  Random House

  The Floods

  Click Here for The Flood Family Files.

  Normal people

  Turn down ANY street to see them.

  At first glance, as long as you are at least a hundred metres away and see them from the back on a dark autumn evening when it’s raining, the Floods look like any other family. There is a mum and a dad and some children. They all have two eyes, one head, two arms and two legs and hair on top of their heads – except Satanella, who has no arms but four legs and hair all over her body.

  At second glance, especially if you’re less than a hundred metres away and see them from the front, the Floods do not look like any other family. Mum and Dad and most of the children always wear black clothes. Even Satanella wears a black collar encrusted with black diamonds against her black fur. Only the youngest, Betty, is different. Her hair is blonde and she wears ordinary, brightly coloured clothes and skips a lot.

  The Floods are a family of witches and wizards, even Betty, although she looks almost normal. She likes looking different from the rest of them. It makes her feel special. It also lulls the world into a false sense of security. She is the only one of the Floods who people don’t cross the road to avoid.

  They even feel sorry for her and say, ‘Look at that sweet little girl having to live with those weird people, poor thing.’

  It all started when Betty’s mother, Mordonna, decided that six children who were witches or wizards was enough. Valla, Satanella, Merlinmary, Winchflat and the twins, Morbid and Silent, were each, in their own weird and scary way, the sort of children any witch or wizard parent would be very proud of.

  Satanella, for example, is not the family pet – she’s actually one of the children, but because of an unfortunate accident with a prawn and a faulty wand, she was turned into a fox terrier. Although it’s possible to reverse the spell, Satanella has actually grown to like being on all fours. Merlinmary also has hair all over her body1 but she is not a dog, even though she does growl a lot and likes chasing sticks.

  ‘I would like a little girl,’ Mordonna said to her husband, Nerlin, after the twins were born. ‘A pretty little girl who wants to dress up dolls in nice frocks instead of turning them into frogs. I want a little girl who I can do cooking with and make cakes that taste like chocolate instead of bat’s blood.’

  ‘But, sweetheart, we’re wizards and witches,’ said Nerlin. ‘Turning things into frogs and blood is what we do. Our families have done it since the dawn of time.’

  ‘I know, and I adore frogs and blood,’ said Mordonna, ‘and I love our six wonderfully talented, evil children who are as vile as your wildest dreams. I just want one pretty little girl to do ordinary mummy and daughter things with.’

  ‘But you grow death-cap mushrooms with the twins and you sharpen the cat’s teeth with Valla.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ Mordonna replied, ‘and I love all those things, but what about knitting and painting pictures of flowers?’

  ‘What’s knitting?’ said Nerlin, but Mordonna had made up her mind. She was going to have one more child and that child would be a normal, ordinary girl with no magical powers. And instead of being made in a laboratory using an ancient recipe book, a very big turbocharged wand and a set of shiny Jamie Oliver saucepans, like some of the other children had been, this new child would be made the same way as you and I were.2

  When Betty was born, she looked just like the pretty little girl Mordonna had dreamt of. Of course, being a wizard’s child she was very advanced for her age, and by the time she was three she was helping her mum make soufflés and had knitted a cardigan for her granny, Queen Scratchrot. (The queen, with several other friends and relations, is buried in the back garden and feels the cold on winter nights because most of her skin has rotted away.)

  But no matter how ‘normal’ she looks, Betty still has magic inside her. It’s just little things most people wouldn’t notice – like when she reaches for a book way above her head and suddenly the book is there on the table. Or when a glass floats across the kitchen, fills itself up at the tap, the water turning into cordial with two ice cubes and a straw, and then floats back into Betty’s left hand.

  Where the Floods live is a bit like them. From a distance it looks ordinary, but up close, it isn’t. They don’t live in a big dark menacing castle in Transylvania Waters like all their other relations. They live in a normal country in a normal city3 in an ordinary street in a house with a front garden and a back garden. Except the Floods’ house is kind of different.

  It isn’t because the hedge tries to reach out and touch you when you walk by, and it isn’t because the garden is so overgrown you can’t see the house. It isn’t because there are three black clouds always ho
vering over it, even on a bright sunny day, or that huge black vampire bats hang in every tree. And it certainly isn’t because the Floods are nasty to everyone. They aren’t. If people weren’t too scared to ask, the Floods would happily lend them their lawnmower (if they had one) or give them a cup of sugar.

  When the Floods bought the house, it was the same as all the others in the street. It had a neat lawn at the front and back with beds of pretty flowers. The front door was red and the windows had bright white awnings and shiny clean glass.

  The only thing the Floods didn’t change was the front door.

  ‘A lovely shade of fresh blood,’ Mordonna had said, ‘but the rest will have to go.’

  They painted the window awnings black and added cobwebs and dead flies. They pulled up all the awful flowers and planted thistles and stinging nettles and made it quite clear to the lawn that if it didn’t stop growing, it was concrete time. They buried their various dead and semi-dead friends and relations in the back garden and trained the front gate to keep out unwanted visitors.

  People usually cross the road rather than walk by the gate. The mailman puts the letters in the box with a long pair of barbecue tongs ever since the day the mailbox ate his watch.

  Underneath the house, the Floods created a vast maze of cellars and tunnels that reach out in all directions for hundreds of metres. The lowest level is so deep underground, you can feel the heat from the centre of the Earth and actually fry an egg on the floor.

  And around the edge of the garden, they planted a tall, thick, vicious hedge that keeps out most prying eyes, though not all, as we shall see later.

  The Floods are a happy, loving family and they think their house is perfect. The problem is everyone else. Most people don’t like things to be different. They want everyone to have the same things they’ve got – the same car, the same wide-screen television, the same barbecue and the same two-point-four children. Then they can go to the supermarket and all feel the same, and all talk about the TV programme they watched last night and where they’re all going on their holidays.

  In fact, it’s not quite that simple. Secretly most people want to be exactly the same as everyone else – only a bit better. They want their car to be the one with the luxury bits and bigger engine and they want their children to be better at school, and they want to have more money and a spa bath that all their neighbours haven’t got.

  So really, everyone is jealous of everyone else.

  Except the Floods.

  They don’t even have a car. If they want to go anywhere they either travel by turbo broomsticks that go so fast ordinary people can’t see them,4 or else they walk or take a taxi. Apart from Betty, they never go on the bus because people complain about the smell – which isn’t so much bad as weird, like roses mixed with pepper and wet dog. And if they want a spa bath, they take off their clothes and stand in the back garden while their three black clouds rain on them. Not cold rain like you and I would get, but warm rain that even has shampoo and conditioner in it. Until recently they didn’t even have a television.

  So while everyone in the street thinks the Floods are strange, scary and different and never invite them to their coffee mornings or Tupperware parties, the Floods are probably happier than all of them. Apart from the eldest son, Valla, they don’t even go out to work, because they have everything they need without having to.

  Monday morning, 5.30 am

  As the morning light peeped in through the blood-red curtains, the Floods’ alarm snake bit Mordonna on the neck and woke her up. An alarm snake is like an alarm clock except it doesn’t make any noise and it wakes you up by biting you on the neck. (Which means it isn’t actually like an alarm clock at all, except it does wake you up and it does alarm you.) The big advantage of the alarm snake is that it only wakes up the person it bites, so someone else in the bed can stay fast asleep. If you are a normal human, it doesn’t wake you up so much as kill you because it’s very poisonous.

  Nerlin was lying on his back with his mouth open, snoring like a hippopotamus that had just swallowed a rusty steam train. The alarm snake licked the sleep from Mordonna’s eyes and slithered into the next room to wake Valla. Mordonna checked herself in the mirror to see that she was still as beautiful as she had been when she went to bed, and then went downstairs to start the day.

  ‘Come on, everyone,’ she shouted as she went downstairs. ‘Time to get up, time to get ready for school.’

  There were seven children and only one bathroom, so there were the usual fights over who got in first, just like in normal houses. Everyone tried to get there before Merlinmary because it could take her up to an hour to do her hair, on account of the fact that it covers every square centimetre of her body. She even has hair on her eyeballs and tongue. While she was in the bathroom, though, she charged up all the electric razors and toothbrushes.

  Breakfast in the Flood house was probably a bit different from your house. Vlad the cat hung around under the kitchen table rubbing against someone’s leg. No one ever discovered where the leg had come from or who it belonged to, but it was there every morning.

  There was a lot more running around than in normal houses. Not because the children were out of control, but because their breakfasts kept trying to get away from them.

  ‘Morbid, Silent, would you stop juggling your breakfast and just eat it,’ snapped Mordonna.

  ‘Yeah, but look, Mum – we can make it stick to the ceiling,’ said Morbid. Silent simply nodded vigorously and grunted. He always thinks exactly the same as his twin and can’t see the point in just repeating everything Morbid says.

  ‘Anyone can make slugs stick to the ceiling, dear. Just eat them up while they’re still nice and slimy.’

  Of course, there was always at least one slug that slid out of the bread and vanished under the stove.

  ‘Betty, stop teasing the sugar bats,’ said Mordonna. ‘Just put them in the warm milk and eat them up, or you’ll have to go back to baby food.’

  The trouble was that Betty wasn’t really old enough for sugar bats. She was only ten and her hands were too small to control them. She didn’t actually tease them – that would be cruel – but every time she got one on her spoon and held it up to her mouth, it tried to fly off and hide behind the fridge. In the end she had to eat them with her fingers, even though it wasn’t a very well-behaved thing to do.

  Vlad, the cat, added to the general chaos by leaping about on the kitchen units trying to catch the bats, which of course he never did.

  After breakfast Vlad always felt depressed for an hour or so. He had no problem ripping little birds to bits, but he had never once caught a bat. No one had thought to tell him that sugar bats have radar and could see him coming.

  Winchflat and Merlinmary didn’t do much better. Their rats’ brains were so slippery they kept falling on the floor and slithering off to join the slugs under the stove.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, children, if you can’t stop mucking about, I’m just going to make you eat cornflakes,’ said Mordonna, tipping Satanella’s accountant’s entrails into her bowl by the back door. Satanella always had her meals right next to the cat-flap so she could make a quick exit into the garden. Quite often she had to throw her food up and eat it again several times before she could finally keep it down.

  ‘Yeuuuwww, cornflakes,’ said Morbid.

  ‘Gross,’ said Betty.

  By the time the six youngest children had caught their breakfast and either eaten it or sucked its insides out, there was barely time to wipe the blood and slime off their chins5 before the wizard school bus materialised in one of the cellars.

  ‘Come on, kids, hurry up. The bus will be here in a minute,’ Mordonna told them all. ‘Tangle your hair and do make sure you’ve got blood under every single one of your fingernails. I don’t want the other parents thinking I don’t bring you up properly.’

  ‘Mum, Satanella’s eaten my homework,’ said Merlinmary.

  ‘Well, she’ll just have to bring
it up again when you get to school,’ her mother replied. ‘And Morbid, do remember to lock your school bag. I don’t want your lunch crawling out and biting the bus driver again.’

  (There are two reasons the bus appears in the cellar. Firstly, that’s where the bus stop is; and secondly, the bus that takes five of the children to school is not an ordinary bus, so if it did appear in the street outside the Floods’ house, it would scare the living daylights out of the neighbours.

  The school is a special wizard and witch school, hidden away from the normal world in a secret valley right up in the mountains in darkest Patagonia. To reach the school each day, Satanella, Merlinmary, Winchflat and the twins have to cross several oceans, some of which can get very angry. They also travel over a desert or two, through fifty-metre snowdrifts, up a tall waterfall and across a bottomless lake. All of which, of course, an ordinary bus would find a bit difficult to do. In fact, an ordinary bus wouldn’t get more than twenty metres across the sea before sinking.

  The wizard school bus, on the other hand, covers all these vast distances in nine minutes. To call the wizard bus a bus is stretching the definition of the word ‘bus’. The wizard bus is not so much a bus as a dragon with seats and a toilet.)

  Monday morning, 8.00 am

  At last the Floods’ house grew quiet again. Mordonna checked herself in the mirror.

  ‘Still staggeringly beautiful,’ she said and sat down with a huge cup of strong coffee.

  The remaining Flood child, Valla, finally came downstairs. He had the good sense to stay in bed cuddling his pet vampire bats, Nigel and Shirley, until the other kids were out of the house. Then he got up and spent a relaxed ten minutes in the bathroom bleaching his face, before going downstairs for a quick cup of milkman’s blood.6 He would then take the unknown leg from under the kitchen table and give it to Nigel and Shirley to chew on while he was at work.