Floods 9 Page 6

  He felt his whole being about to explode in uncontrolled rage. Yet he managed to stand completely still and silent. This he only managed to do by swallowing his own tongue. He stopped the steam inside his head from bursting out by biting off his little fingers and stuffing one in each ear. He grew faint from loss of blood, yet these sacrifices were worth the prizes the Summer School had brought him. He slid down behind the heavy curtains and fell into unconsciousness. No one noticed even when a thin trickle of blood crawled out from beneath the curtains and vanished into a crack in the floorboards.

  Damn, curses and damn, he thought at the thought of parting with some of his precious blood.

  * * *

  39 The most stupid wizard who has ever lived is Floella Yardstyck, who lives in a small valley on the far side of Lake Tarnish. She is Transylvania Waters’s only person who is known as a Living Legend, which is a term humans use for very stupid people who can stand up and speak their name at the same time. If they play sport or sing really badly then they are called a Super Living Legend.

  40 Actually, he didn’t so much abolish them as give them away to England, helping to make Britain one of the most controlled nanny states in the so-called free world.

  41 Conniption is such a brilliant word, I am quite upset to realise that it has taken until The Floods Book 9 to use it. I will try harder and make sure I have conniptions in every other Floods book from now on. Conniptions are particularly nice on sourdough toast with finely chopped lettuce and mint sauce. No, that’s not right. That’s bacon.

  ‘I think we should have a souvenir of our time here,’ said the Headmaster. ‘Something big that says NEW YORK.’

  ‘Well, there’s plenty of big stuff in America,’ said Betty. ‘They’re always going on about how everything they’ve got is bigger than everyone else’s.’

  ‘Their bottoms are,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘And their food,’ said the Cook.

  ‘I think I have the perfect suggestion,’ said Winchflat, ‘but we’ll do it in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep.’

  ‘There is never a time when everyone’s asleep,’ said Betty. ‘After all, New York is called The City That Never Sleeps.’

  ‘I thought that was Antwerp,’ said Ffiona, who was a bit of a geography nerd.

  ‘No, no,’ said the Headmaster. ‘I think you’ll find that Antwerp is The City That Sleeps In Late Every Morning.’

  ‘I thought that was Buenos Aires,’ said Merlinmary.

  ‘No, that’s The City That Sleeps Every Afternoon,’ said Winchflat, turning on his Wonderful-Memory-Implanting-Machine. ‘Anyway, a few quick adjustments and tonight New York will be The City That Decided To Have An Early Night.’

  So they packed their bags and removed every tiny scrap of evidence that might show any of them had been in New York. Then they transferred ownership of the Summer School building to a charity for sad, lost, lonely puppies. They removed all evidence of Le Inondazioni Olive Oil Import and Export Company and shuffled the buildings back to fill the gap they had created for it. Winchflat did the best he could with his Wonderful Machine to erase all memories of the election and Morbid becoming Mayor and the Great No Toilet Roll Pandemic, but for weeks afterwards every New Yorker was left with a head full of the uneasy feeling that something wasn’t quite right though they could never put their finger on it.42 The huge numbers of red rubber balls everywhere only added to the confusion.

  But all of that was nothing compared to the thing the Floods took away with them when they left.

  ‘And you must admit,’ said Winchflat as he stood on the steps of Castle Twilight back in Transylvania Waters, looking out over the town towards Lake Tarnish where it now stood, ‘the Statue of Liberty looks a lot better here than it did in America.’

  ‘Indeed it does, darling,’ said Mordonna. ‘And the wizard’s hat is a great improvement.’

  * * *

  42 I think you’ll actually find that this is how New Yorkers always feel.

  The next week was spent catching up with the laundry, sleeping a lot and generally doing nothing before it was time for school to start again. Everyone was so busy that no one actually noticed Aubergine Wealth was not around. Even though he had been born there, he didn’t live in Transylvania Waters so no one realised he hadn’t gone home. He had a house in Switzerland that no one was ever invited to visit and that was where he always spent the holidays. Though he didn’t like to think he so much ‘spent’ the holidays as ‘saved’ the holidays.

  His house was halfway up a mountain overlooking Geneva, and in particular overlooking the six Swiss banks where he had large amounts of his money hidden.

  Other places he had his money hidden included:

  • In three hundred cardboard boxes under his bed.

  • In an enormous sock inside a plastic bag under a rock on Inaccessible Island, guarded by a flock of really bad-tempered Rockhopper Penguins who spent all day hopping on and off the rock and spitting at anyone who ever went near it – which no one did, so wasting all their spit made them even more bad-tempered.

  • Inside a big tin embedded in a massive block of concrete in the heart of the radioactive Chernobyl nuclear power station.

  • In a wallet that was so big it took ten men to lift it, except there was no way Aubergine Wealth was going to tell one other person, never mind ten, that he had a huge wallet of cash, so it was slowly sinking into the lawn behind his house, which was as far as he had managed to drag it.

  • Stuck over every single square metre of every wall in his house, then painted over with pretty flowers to disguise it as wallpaper.

  • Lots of other places.

  • Lots more other places.43

  When Aubergine Wealth regained consciousness, the Summer School was deserted apart from a large number of sad, lost, lonely puppies who were licking his face very enthusiastically because they were not lost or lonely any more.

  There was also another person there, and this person had pulled Aubergine’s fingers out of his ears and was sewing them back onto his hands.

  The pain was excruciating.

  ‘I expect you are in excruciating pain,’ said the lady. ‘Don’t worry, I can fix that.’

  She hit him on the head with a heavy saucepan and instantly all the pain went away, due to a sudden outbreak of unconsciousness.

  When Aubergine came round, he was lying on a large couch with his head in the lady’s lap. She had finished sewing his fingers back on and was bathing his face and hands with a soft warm cloth to remove all the remaining dried blood and puppy drool.

  ‘Tell me, you poor man,’ she said. ‘Who chopped your fingers off?’

  ‘Well, it’s a long story,’ Aubergine began.

  ‘I’m in no hurry,’ said the lady, stroking his head. ‘By the way, I am Chrysanthemum Gofaintly and this is the Manhattan Home For Sad, Lost, Lonely Puppies. The puppies and I are wondering who you are and what you are doing here.’

  Aubergine Wealth sat up and looked around. Every last speck of evidence that Quicklime College had ever been there had vanished, even down to the teethmarks Satanella had left in the doorframe and the unmentionable stains on the wallpaper.

  ‘Actually, it’s a very long story,’ he said. ‘And I think you probably wouldn’t believe any of it anyway.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ said Chrysanthemum, ‘my name is Chrysanthemum. My parents were two wild hippies in California in the nineteen-sixties. I live with two-hundred-and-whatever puppies. I’ll believe anything.’

  ‘Do you believe in wizards?’

  ‘Well, of course I do,’ said Chrysanthemum. ‘Half the people in the commune I grew up in were witches and wizards.’

  ‘No, no. I don’t mean long-haired hippies who took strange potions and thought having a bath was a capitalist plot,’ said Aubergine Wealth. ‘I mean real wizards who can do magic.’

  ‘Hey, baby, everything was magic in the sixties.’

  ‘I mean real magic, like this,’ said Auber
gine.

  He looked around the room and focused on an old armchair covered in sleeping puppies. As he concentrated the chair lifted itself up in the air and floated slowly towards them.

  ‘Oh, that sort of magic,’ said Chrysanthemum and fainted.

  When she woke up she was lying on her back on the sofa with her head in Aubergine Wealth’s lap. The armchair with the sleeping puppies was still floating around the room in lazy circles and now Chrysanthemum and Aubergine’s sofa began to float after it.

  ‘Wow,’ said Chrysanthemum.

  It is an unwritten law that wizards tell humans as little as possible about their world. Very few humans know there is such a country as Transylvania Waters and even fewer know about Quicklime College. For most humans the world of witches and wizards is like it is in story books, all made up and rather silly. True wizards are only too happy to keep it that way. It makes life a lot less complicated.

  Since Nerlin had become King of Transylvania Waters and human tourists had begun visiting, things hadn’t really changed that much. None of the visitors realised the entire population were wizards. They just thought they were a bit strange, which is what everyone thinks about anyone who comes from a different country to them.

  He wasn’t sure why, but Aubergine felt completely overwhelmed with a great need to tell Chrysanthemum Gofaintly everything.

  Chrysanthemum was a sweet, floaty hippy who thought everything in the world could be put right with a nice vase of flowers and some homeopathic ylang-ylang drops. Aubergine Wealth was a hard-nosed, soulless businessman who thought everything in the world could be put right by everyone giving him all their money.

  Well, my world would be put right, he thought. Who cares about anyone else’s?

  Yet he felt deeply attracted to Chrysanthemum. Sure, she was the only person who had ever sewn his fingers back on, but there was more to it than that. Whatever it was didn’t fit in with anything he had learned up until that point. It had nothing to do with spreadsheets and calculators or the rise and fall of the value of gold, so he was confused. For the first time in his life the faintest hint of the tiniest possibility that there might be more to life than money crept into the edge of his brain.

  Don’t be ridiculous, his brain said, but his heart said, Hey, man, think about it.

  Chrysanthemum Gofaintly also felt deeply attracted to Aubergine. Sure, he was the first man she had ever sewn bits of his body back onto and he was the first man she had ever felt sweet thoughts for who didn’t need a haircut and a wash, but there was more to it than that.

  He had a strange hypnotic smell and she sensed that beneath his apparently soulless exterior there was the heart of a true romantic. She could see the two of them growing broccoli and radishes together in a little cottage by a beautiful lake while a large number of once sad, lost and lonely puppies scampered playfully in the soft grass biting the heads off tiny lizards. That last bit confused her a little, but she let it pass and concentrated on the organic vegetables.

  So Aubergine Wealth sat the lovely Chrysanthemum Gofaintly on his knee and told her everything. He told her not just about teaching at Quicklime College and the Summer School, but everything right back to his earliest memory, which was selling his Lego for eighty-five per cent profit to another child at pre-school. He told her that by recycling his disposable nappies and selling his baby teeth on eBay he had become a millionaire at the age of five and that by the time he was ten he had been a billionaire.

  Chrysanthemum Gofaintly was enchanted. Did she think to herself, here was a man who she could save from the mercenary grip of capitalism and lead down the path of inner peace, yoga and Buddhist contentment into a world of the simple country life and living happily ever after? Did she see her future making this lost, wealth-obsessed man realise his full potential in a higher level of meditation, cuddly puppies and organic vegies?

  No, she didn’t.

  She suddenly realised that she had needs too. Big, unfulfilled needs she had kept locked away in her heart for years.

  Stuff the broccoli and radishes, she thought. Stuff the poor defenceless animals. SHOW ME THE MONEY!

  And then she realised what the strange, hypnotic smell was. It was a heady, delirious smell that made a vase of roses smell like nothing more than a bunch of flowers. It was the scent of money, rolls of hundred-dollar notes bursting from Aubergine’s every pocket. To the child of penniless hippies all this was a whole new world. The most money Chrysanthemum had ever had in her hands in one go was twelve dollars and she had thought the fact she could buy three chickpea burgers and a litre of wheatgrass all at once had been pretty cool.

  Now as Aubergine rose to his feet, he just leaked money everywhere. Notes fluttered around like very big butterflies, only much more beautiful. Chrysanthemum picked them out of the air and buried her face in them. She breathed in the scent of wealth, closed her eyes and sighed as a gentle smile of paradise spread across her face.

  Stuff meditation. Stuff Zen Buddhism, she thought. This is pure nirvana.

  And you are the most perfect woman in the world, thought Aubergine, who knew the look of money-worship when he saw it.

  ‘All those years I wasted,’ said Chrysanthemum. ‘All that floaty hippy rubbish, living on tofu and tinkly bells and dopey chanting. When all the time paradise was right here.’

  Aubergine thought he had died and gone to heaven. All those years he had spent collecting more and more wealth without stopping for a second to ask himself why. Now he knew. Now he had someone to lavish all his incredibly massive amounts of money on.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said nervously. ‘I don’t suppose you would consider marrying me, would you?’

  ‘I would,’ said Chrysanthemum. ‘Have you got all the paperwork?’

  ‘Paperwork?’

  ‘Yes, the pre-nuptial agreements and contracts.’

  ‘Do we need all that?’ said Aubergine.

  ‘I just assumed . . .’ Chrysanthemum began. ‘Do you think Romeo and Juliet had paperwork?’

  ‘Well, no, but then look what happened to them,’ said Chrysanthemum.

  ‘No, what I meant was it doesn’t seem very romantic.’

  Chrysanthemum knew that Aubergine Wealth loved her more than she could have ever imagined. For someone so staggeringly wealthy to marry someone with no contracts to protect them, they would have to be really, really in love, or stupid, and Chrysanthemum knew that Aubergine was definitely not stupid.

  ‘Wow,’ she whispered.

  ‘Of course, there could be a few problems,’ said Aubergine Wealth.

  ‘Well, of course there could. It’s only to be expected,’ said Chrysanthemum. ‘Two people who have been single for years, suddenly being married. It’s going to take a bit of getting used to for both of us.’

  ‘No, my beloved, that wasn’t what I meant,’ said Aubergine. ‘I meant that Quicklime College will probably be looking for me. I have seventeen billion dollars or so that they want me to give back to the people I acquired it from.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Chrysanthemum Gofaintly. ‘Did you break the law to get any of it?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Well then, it’s yours to keep and I’m sure any court in the land would support you.’

  ‘But Quicklime College includes a lot of the most powerful witches and wizards on Earth,’ said Aubergine. ‘They are more powerful than any court and as far as they are concerned, their rules and laws are above any human laws.’

  ‘Mmm, I see. Well, we’ll have to work out a plan,’ said Chrysanthemum, ‘a plan that does not include giving-it-back options. That is not going to happen.’

  Aubergine Wealth knew he had found Miss Right, Ms Right, Mrs Right and Miss Totally Perfect. There had been a nagging thought in the back of his brain that if all else failed, he could always save himself by doing as he had been ordered. It had made him feel better knowing that he had a potential solution if he really needed it, but the thought of losing it all had also given
him an upset stomach and a bad headache.

  Now his thoughts were all over the place.44 He knew what the Floods were capable of. He had heard of their kinder punishments, such as turning children into refrigerators or feeding them to the partly – but not completely – dead Queen Mother. He had also heard rumours of the punishments no one was supposed to know about, such as turning people into Belgian history teachers and, if that worked, turning them inside-out too. There was even the legendary punishment where they had turned a very evil slum-landlord into a frog in the kitchen of a French restaurant – not just any frog, but one with ninety big, fat, succulent legs. The list of extremely creative punishments the Floods were rumoured to have meted out to bad people was endless and grew even longer than endless every day. He knew that all the really bad ones were only rumours, but imagination is a powerful weapon, especially when you are the potential victim.

  On the other hand, he was now suddenly and totally in love so deeply that he thought he might be possibly, perhaps, maybe prepared to give every last cent of his fortune away if he had to. Giving back the rewards he had earned from the Summer School would be small change compared to the rewards of winning Chrysanthemum’s heart.

  Well, maybe not all of it, but so much that he would be left with no more than ten or twenty – well, say thirty billion dollars, he thought.

  I can’t believe I have these thoughts inside my head, he added, and that I’m even considering them as possibilities.

  But he needn’t have worried. As these new thoughts shocked his brain, Chrysanthemum’s brain had also changed dramatically. Step aside, Miss Nice Girl, feeding sardines to little old ladies and helping kittens across the road – Ms Super-Computer-I-Love-Money-Oh-How-I-Love-Money is here. If the little old ladies want sardines, fine, but each one will cost ten dollars, and the kittens will never see the other side of the road. They will see the big fat steamrollers turning them into lovely designer mats to sell in the most exclusive over-priced boutiques. Mmm, that gives me an idea, she thought, looking around the room at all the lovely, happy, cuddly puppies.