Floods 5 Page 8

  You see, Betty had always felt a bit annoyed that she couldn’t go to school with all the others. Compared to Quicklime College, her ordinary human school seemed really boring, but it wasn’t only that. The truth was, she missed her brothers and sisters. So because Winchflat was very fond of his baby sister he had made her a special tiny TV. The TV had four different channels: one for Winchflat, one for the twins and one each for Satanella and Merlinmary. There was no danger of the Hearse Whisperer or anyone else hacking into this special TV because it was actually built inside Betty’s brain. Whenever she wanted to see what her brothers and sisters were doing at Quicklime’s, all she had to do was concentrate a bit and there they were in her mind’s eye. Like a normal TV, she could see and hear them, but they couldn’t see or hear her. They couldn’t make direct contact with each other.

  Whenever Betty got bored at school, which only happened once or twice every five minutes, she turned on her TV to see what the others were doing. The more she watched, the more she became determined to persuade her parents to let her go to Quicklime’s. Changing mushrooms into baby dragons, which was what the twins had been doing last time she’d looked, was about four trillion and fifty times more exciting than learning how to add 423 to 97, which was what she had been supposed to be doing at Sunnyview Primary School that day.

  Winchflat, who had a little My-Sister-Has-Turned-On-Her-TV-Detector, knew that Betty tuned in to all four stations lots of times every day,38 so she would already have some idea of what had been happening.

  ‘All we have to do,’ he explained to everyone, ‘is write a message on a piece of paper and hold it up and then the next time little sister tunes in she’ll read it.’

  ‘You mean she can watch us whenever she wants to?’ said Merlinmary when Winchflat told them more about Betty’s TV.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yeuuhhh. You mean even when we go to the toilet?’ said Morbid.

  ‘No, I put a special filter in for that,’ Winchflat explained. ‘No toilet or bathroom stuff.’

  ‘Thank goodness,’ said Satanella, who had some secret and rather disgusting habits which involved swapping toilet paper for kittens, and no one would want to see what happened when Merlinmary, who could never switch off her massive electrical field, went to the bathroom. Mind you, even without the filter, Betty wouldn’t have been able to see anything when Merlinmary went to the bathroom, because of the incredible amount of steam created by all the water boiling frantically away in the lavatory bowl and the clouds of smoke from the burning toilet paper.

  The first time Betty had tuned in and found them all in the Sahara Desert, she thought they were on a school field trip.

  ‘That is so unfair,’ she said. ‘They get to go to a massive desert in North Africa and all my class gets is a tour round the local yoghurt factory.’

  She was overlooking what had happened at the yoghurt factory. It had actually been quite a brilliant visit. Pretty dull at first, but when the manager – who was the sort of short, bald loser who could only make himself feel good by humiliating children, a bit like a PE teacher – made Betty’s best friend, Ffiona, slip on her bottom in a raspberry yoghurt puddle, things had become a lot more fun. A few mind-controlled adjustments to some of the machines, combined with a couple of quick spells, and the place had erupted in chaos. It would be months before they scraped all the banana puree off the roof and caught the last of the giant Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches that had suddenly appeared in the hazelnut dream pudding vats, and were keeping everyone away with their hissing. And how they would ever get the full-sized Russian submarine out of the low-fat strawberry yoghurt tank without the torpedoes exploding was anyone’s guess.39

  Betty soon worked out that her brothers and sisters were not on a school trip, but on the run from the Hearse Whisperer, her family’s sworn enemy. Once she had read Winchflat’s notes, she went to her mother.

  ‘Young lady, if you think I’m letting you go off to some desolate island off the coast of Tristan da Cunha to lure the most evil being in the world into a bottle,’ said Mordonna, ‘you’ve got another think coming.’

  ‘But it’s the only way we can save them,’ Betty pleaded. ‘You have to let me go.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘I could go,’ said Nerlin. ‘In disguise.’

  ‘So you – a six-foot-six-tall middle-aged wizard with a big nose – are going to disguise yourself as a pretty, blonde ten-year-old girl?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Umm, err, well, if you helped me with some magic and a blonde wig and I got down on my knees I could,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘My darling, there is no magic anywhere that could make you pretty,’ said Mordonna. ‘Sure, I could turn you into a girl with a couple of spells and a pair of scissors, but pretty? No way.’

  ‘But, Mum …’ Betty began.

  ‘No, there’s only one thing to do,’ said Mordonna. ‘I will go and lure the Hearse Whisperer into the bottle. After all, I’m the one she’s trying to catch to take back to my father, so she won’t dare try to harm me. And when I suddenly appear, she’ll think I’ve come to save my children and be so pleased with herself that her plan has worked, she’ll let her guard down.’

  So Betty detached Winchflat’s My-Sister-Has-Turned-On-Her-TV-Detector from behind her left ear and gave it to her mother, so Winchflat would know she was on her way to Tristan da Cunha. Though, of course, he would think it was Betty, not his mother.

  ‘And don’t either of you dare follow me,’ said Mordonna to Betty and Nerlin. ‘I’ll go via England to collect Chloe from Castle Clacton, and then I’ll go on to the Sahara to join the children.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Nerlin. ‘Not you alone with that big bull. How are you going to stop it rampaging?’

  ‘I’ll just take off my sunglasses and look it in the eye.’40

  The Hearse Whisperer had reached the bit of her plan that was the bit she was going to sort out later – except later had arrived and she wasn’t quite sure what to do. All the earlier bits of the plan had gone beautifully, and even when things had looked like they were getting complicated, such as all the Klaus von Klaus clones, she had managed to use them to her advantage.

  The only bit of her plan that hadn’t gone quite right was the bit just before the bit she was going to sort out later. Yes, all five Flood children were under suspicion of murder, and that was brilliant, but she had lost them, so there wasn’t much point to them being under suspicion.

  Still, it was only a matter of time before they’d be found. There were wanted posters stuck on walls all round the world. Of course, no one who knew the Floods thought they were guilty and everyone in the wizard community realised that the whole thing was part of an evil plan, so Grusom had been frustrated to receive no information about their whereabouts, no clues whatsoever, not even a prank call.

  Grusom had even sent emails and faxes to Interpol with the Floods’ photos, but Interpol had dealt with Grusom before and were well aware of his similarity to a bucket of angry jellyfish, so they knew exactly what to do when his email and fax arrived. They swung into immediate action and did this:

  and this:

  The Hearse Whisperer had traced the five children to the coffins in the cemetery where they had hidden overnight. She had discovered their tunnels down into the catacombs and found the place where they had met each other, but then the trail had gone cold. Not just cool, but so cold your skin would burn with frostbite.

  The Hearse Whisperer had assumed that Quicklime’s would get in touch with Mordonna to let her know that her children were suspects in a murder case, but her internet hacking showed they hadn’t. No letter, no email, no carrier pigeon, nothing, not even telepathy. It was as if Quicklime College simply did not care about the welfare of their students.

  (Which, of course, they didn’t. Quicklime College had a strict policy regarding its students’ parents. Apart from the annual invitation to Sports Day, the school pretended parents didn’t exist. This was not for any sec
urity reasons, but simply because it made life a whole lot easier, as any school teacher knows.

  Lessons, yes – when it came to teaching spells, genetic engineering, cloning and all the useful and important things a wizard or witch needs to know to get through life, the school did all that stuff perfectly. But get yourself wanted for the murder of a Belgian professor and you were on your own.

  This was a deliberate policy that the headmaster claimed was created to help his students develop strong, independent survival skills. The truth was that the teachers would much rather sit with their feet up drinking tea and eating chocolate digestive biscuits than have to bother with a load of whinging kids’ problems.

  One of Quicklime’s thirteen mottos was ‘Out of School, Out of Mind’.41

  Incredibly, in the whole history of the school only seventy-two students had ever been accused of murdering Belgian professors, and less than half of those had actually done it. So the school thought, quite sensibly, that it wasn’t that important. Belgium, as everyone knows, has too many professors anyway, so in a way the students were doing the country a favour.42 Thirty-four dead Belgian professors was nowhere near as important as not letting your tea get too cold to dunk your chocolate digestive biscuit in and getting just the right amount of wetness so your biscuit didn’t fall apart.43)

  Now it seemed that all the Hearse Whisperer could do was sit and wait. She was good at sitting and waiting. She had done a great deal of it over the centuries and she knew that if you sat and waited long enough, eventually something would happen.

  Lord Clacton sat in the corner with a great big silly grin on his face and dribble running down his chin. Mordonna had leant forward to dip her chocolate digestive biscuit44 into her cup of tea and her sunglasses had slipped off, allowing the lord a brief glimpse of her eyes. Now he was totally in love with her.

  Apart from his black labrador, Bertie de Quincey of Rattlebox, Lord Clacton had never been in love before. Absent-minded scientists don’t do that sort of thing. The strange thing was that even when Mordonna put her sunglasses back on, the spell hadn’t worn off like it was supposed to. Bertie licked pathetically at his master’s left hand, but Lord Clacton ignored him.

  ‘Can you do something, Mother?’ said Winchflat. ‘We can’t go off and leave him like that.’

  Mordonna tried every spell she knew, but nothing would wipe the happy grin off Lord Clacton’s face. Even Chloe rampaging about and breathing angry steam into his face couldn’t break the enchantment.

  ‘Shall I bite his ankle?’ said Satanella. ‘That might help.’

  ‘I could give him a huge shock,’ said Merlinmary, but nothing worked.

  In the end they led the poor man outside into the desert, gave him a bucket and spade and told him he that if he could break the Guinness Book of Records sandcastle record of 289,756 castles in a straight line, then Mordonna would let him kiss her hand. Because the wind kept blowing them away, he never managed to build more than seven. The story did have a happy ending, though, because Lord Clacton found his time machine buried in a sand dune, so he sent himself back to just before Mordonna dropped her sunglasses and protected himself by putting his head in a paper bag.

  Mordonna made the children a huge bag of smoked bat sandwiches to eat while they were hiding at the back of the cave behind the magic bottle. Then Winchflat took Mordonna and all the children to Inaccessible Island in his Zoomy Thing. Getting Chloe the bull inside the Zoomy Thing without him rampaging it to bits with his horns was a potential problem, so Mordonna took her sunglasses off again and stared him straight in the eyes. After that Chloe was as docile as a kitten – not a kitten tearing a mouse to bits, but a kitten fast asleep on a little girl’s lap.

  Finally everyone and everything was in place. The magic bottle was hidden in Klaus von Klaus’s old cave. The five Flood children were sitting behind it eating their sandwiches, and Chloe the bull, with a big cork stuck to his forehead with double-sided sticky tape, was hiding behind a bush.

  All that remained was for Mordonna to lure the Hearse Whisperer back from Quicklime’s, where she was still doing her sitting-and-waiting-for-something-to-happen thing.

  ‘I see you are doing some sitting-and-waiting-for-something-to-happen,’ Mordonna whispered in the Hearse Whisperer’s ear.

  She was at the time disguised, like the Hearse Whisperer, as a cuckoo. At first, the spy did not realise who she was, but something about the bird sitting next to her made the hairs stand up in the back of her throat.

  ‘It’s you!’ she said as Mordonna flew down to the ground and took her normal form.

  ‘Yes, it’s me,’ said Mordonna. ‘See how clever you have been? You have lured me out of hiding by threatening my children.’

  The Hearse Whisperer was speechless.

  ‘We need to talk, but here is not the right place,’ said Mordonna. ‘I will wait for you on Inaccessible Island.’

  The Hearse Whisperer’s speechlessness only lasted a brief second, but in that second Mordonna vanished.

  She reappeared at the mouth of Klaus von Klaus’s cave and, as the Hearse Whisperer materialised in front of her, she transported herself into the back of the cave with her children.

  This is too good to be true, the Hearse Whisperer said to herself. The fools do not realise that the cave has an Anti-Transport-Yourself-Out-Of-Here Force Field around it. I have them – and not just the Princess, but her vile children too. My lord the King will reward me with the highest honour Transylvania Waters can offer.45

  Mordonna clicked her fingers and the following things happened:

  The rope around Chloe’s neck came undone.

  The soft kitten spell inside Chloe’s head vanished.

  Something very sharp poked Chloe in the bottom.

  A photo of Chloe’s biggest enemy, Trevor the goat, appeared on the back of the Hearse Whisperer’s cloak.

  Chloe rampaged.

  The sand all around the cave boiled up in a mighty storm. The five Klaus von Klaus corpses all came to life and fainted and thirteen palm trees appeared right outside St Mary’s, the school on Tristan da Cunha’s main island forty kilometres away.

  And finally, the Hearse Whisperer went flying into the bottle and the big cork jammed itself into the neck right behind her. Being a Magic Cork, once it was jammed into the neck of the bottle it turned to glass and melted into the glass of the bottle so it became an impenetrable and unbreakable prison.

  The Hearse Whisperer would never be a danger again.46

  The twins carried the bottle to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, a submarine trench under the Pacific Ocean which is 11,033 metres deep and the deepest place on Earth. They weighed the bottle down with 15,000 copies of Big Brother. The DVDs had been encased in lead because, as everyone knows, Big Brother has a half-life of fourteen minutes and if the copies escaped they could cause considerable brain damage to anyone watching them. Then the twins told Twinkletoes, their pet Vampire Octopus, to eat anything that ever went near the bottle. They gave Twinkletoes a fresh dead mermaid to play with, and went back to Quicklime College, where the others, including the five Klaus von Klauses, were waiting for them in the headmaster’s office.

  ‘Of course, I always knew you were innocent,’ the headmaster said, which is the sort of thing people say when they actually think you are guilty, but then find out you’re not. Except in this case the headmaster really had thought the Floods were innocent.

  ‘I was not dead being, good morning, thank you,’ said the original Klaus von Klaus.

  ‘Yes, good afternoon too,’ said one of the clones.

  ‘And Friday morning tea parties, thank you,’ said another.

  ‘I am not Belgian being, thank you, please,’ the original continued. ‘Not professor too, please, but am was only child now have four brothers being. So all is happy ever after being.’

  ‘We pop-group boy band becoming will be,’ said one of the clones.

  ‘No thank you, please,’ said another, ‘not so much
boy band as quite old man band being, once we are learning the speaking English properly.’

  ‘Half past three, thank you, studying I have been,’ said the first clone, ‘and Eurovision Song Contest Singing Language can do. I showing you. Oompa, Boom, Boom Baby Cool Tick-Tock Shalalala Indagoovey.’

  They would still be wittering on like this if Mordonna hadn’t taken her sunglasses off again to shut them up.

  ‘Thank you, please, beautiful lady …’ all five Klaus von Klauses sang in perfect harmony.

  ‘But, but, but, but, but …’ said Grusom. Things were getting way too complicated for Grusom. Not only was the dead body he’d been brought in to examine not dead and not a Belgian professor, but now there were also five identical not-dead-not-Belgian-not-professors, and that was just too big an idea to fit inside his head. The only idea that did fit inside his head was the idea of curling up in a little ball on the floor, sticking his thumb in his mouth and waiting for his mummy to come and change his nappy. He quite liked that idea.

  ‘Ah, you too are doing the Eurovision Song Contest Singing Language,’ said one of the clones.

  ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ Grusom spluttered.

  ‘Cool, right on, dude, you are being,’ said another clone.

  Grusom turned a scary shade of red before turning an even scarier shade of purple as all the blood in his body tried to explode out of his head.

  ‘Psychedelic, man,’ said the third clone. ‘Groovy colour you are making.’

  Grusom opened his mouth. His jaw went up and down, but nothing came out. He ran over to the nearest wall and banged his head against it. The wall collapsed, but Grusom kept on shaking his head while all the Klaus von Klauses sang ‘Grusom is a headbanger’ to the tune of the famous Ramones song, still in perfect harmony.