Floods 5 Page 9

  By now the poor Forensic Special Investigator was in a total trance. A can of magic beans in his trouser pocket exploded, throwing him across the room where he landed in an unconscious heap. The doctors said later that they had never seen such a nasty tomato sauce burn before.

  Avid gently tightened up his straightjacket, lifted him into a wheelbarrow and pushed him outside to the waiting special helicopter for his flight to the Blue Torch Retirement Home For Confused Forensic Scientists, which, because of his awesome reputation, had managed to find him a padded cell with a lovely graveyard view and a lifetime’s supply of new batteries for his torch, even though there was a long waiting list.

  For the first month Avid visited Grusom every day while he dribbled down his vest and drew endless wanted posters of the Floods on the walls in red crayon. For the second month she visited him every second day, by which time the psychiatrist had managed to stop him dribbling and got him drawing with a nice bright sunshine-yellow crayon. After the fourth month Avid only went at weekends and on the first day of the sixth month she met a nice, ordinary, safe bank manager, who didn’t so much sweep her off her feet as offer her a mint while she was waiting for a bus.

  Incredibly, he was actually called Nigel Davenport and he never, ever drew on anything with crayons no matter what colour they were. Avid gave up doing FSI stuff and opened a flower shop and, after a while, which could have been a week, a month or three years, it was too boring to tell, they got married and lived ever after.47

  ‘I must say,’ said Mordonna, ‘it’s amazing the things you learn at school these days.’

  As they did every evening, except when they were hiding in coffins in graveyards or lying down in cellars in deserted villages in the Sahara Desert, or waiting behind glass bottles on incredibly remote islands or …

  OK. As they did most evenings, the Flood family were sitting on their back verandah drinking blood slurpies as the sun set.

  That night the air was filled with the gentle strains of The Five Klauses’ new CD, their soft voices joined in a harmony that was so perfect that lots of people thought it was just one person singing copied four times – which, in a way, it was.

  ‘And by the way, children,’ said Mordonna, ‘I think it’s time you told your father exactly what it was you were doing when you didn’t come home from school the other night, before all this trouble started.’

  ‘Oh, we were, um, just burying something,’ said Satanella.

  ‘Burying what?’ asked Mordonna.

  ‘Um, err, nothing, Mum,’ said Satanella, looking around at her brothers and sisters, hoping they’d rescue her from their mother’s questions.

  ‘People don’t bury nothing,’ said Mordonna, raising one eyebrow.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Nerlin. ‘And it must have been something pretty important for you to stay away all night and not even let us know.’

  ‘No, honest, Mum,’ said Morbid. ‘It was nothing important.’

  Silent nodded.

  Winchflat got up as quietly as he could and turned to go indoors.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Mordonna. ‘Winchflat will tell us. He might be a genius, but the one thing he is useless at is telling lies. Come back here, young man.’

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘OK, no more games,’ said Mordonna in her special voice that the children dared not disobey. ‘Winchflat, tell me what you were burying.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nerlin. ‘Otherwise we might start thinking that crazy FSI man was right about you all.’

  ‘It was food,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Food? Food?’ said Mordonna. ‘What food?’

  ‘Umm, I don’t like to say,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Never mind all that. Just spit it out, young man.’

  ‘That was the trouble, Mum,’ said Merlinmary. ‘We did spit it out.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Satanella, ‘and we didn’t want to upset you, so we put it in our pockets and then later we buried it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your Toffee, Parsnip and Cow’s Foot Jelly Trifle.’

  ‘I thought you loved that,’ said Mordonna. ‘I can’t stand it myself, I only made it for you.’

  ‘All mums say that,’ said Betty.

  ‘I like it,’ said Nerlin, but he liked eating Vegemite, so what would he know?

  ‘Oh dear, I just hope it doesn’t mutate into something uncontrollable,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Not many mums say that,’ said Winchflat and everyone fell about laughing.

  Then the family’s best friends, the Hulberts from down the road at number 19,48 arrived and they all had another round of slurpies while The Five Klauses’ CD made them all feel relaxed and sleepy.

  ‘You know what?’ said Mordonna. ‘I know we’ve talked about this before, but …’

  ‘What’s that, my beloved?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘I think after all this excitement, now would be the perfect time to go on holiday.’

  So they did.

  If you think it would be great to be awarded a Transylvania Waters medal, just remember they are not so much pinned on to your chest as nailed on.

  This glue is REALLY TOXIC. Just opening the tin adds significantly to Global Warming. If you want to stick dead bodies back together again, mix up the following ingredients:

  3 litres of PVA adhesive

  1 teaspoon of tinned dogfood (fake-kitten flavour)

  24 crocodile’s teardrops

  This doesn’t work very well. Things like ears are likely to get blown away in a strong wind. You can use sticky tape as well, but with ears thumb tacks are probably better.

  FOOTNOTES

  1 Mordonna did not normally drink coffee, but with five of her children out all night and no phone call, she was a bit anxious. Her youngest daughter, Betty, was also anxious. Not that her siblings might be in trouble – after all, they were wizards – but that they might be having a really exciting time that she was missing out on. Even though he was fast asleep, Mordonna’s husband, Nerlin, was anxious too, because his wife was down in the kitchen and his feet were getting cold and she hadn’t read him his bedtime story.

  2 There were not enough ghosts and ogres of school age to support a school of their own so they were allowed to study at Quicklime’s along with the regular students and the Smith-Klaxon cannibal triplets.

  3 Of course, bright readers will know already that Patagonia is in South America and that Bruges is a town in Belgium, which is in Europe, and that the two countries are on opposite sides of the world. But some of you might have teachers who know a bit less about geography than a blind upside-down cave fish and think Bruges are those purple marks you get on your skin when you bang yourself.

  4 ‘Vic’ is a very technical FSI word that means victim. It could also mean Victoria or Victor or some smelly ointment you rub on your chest or all three.

  5 The reasons it might not include:

  •I might not be able to think of an answer.

  •I might be able to think of an answer, but decide not to tell you in case you go and get lots of magic beans of your own, which could be very dangerous unless you’ve had special training.

  •I might forget all about it.

  •None of the above.

  •Tuesday.

  6 A couple of the teachers who were only partly assembled arrived carrying their detached body parts in carrier bags. Radius Leg, the Sports master, hopped in because his left leg was in the workshop getting a new sole fitted.

  7 In the Middle Ages it was very fashionable to have hairy ears. People who did not have hairy ears got over the problem by wearing ear wigs, which has nothing at all to do with the fact that there is an insect called an earwig.

  8 Winchflat’s memory was so incredible he could even remember the mixing instructions on the dried dragon’s blood his mother had fed him when he was only three days old.

  9 If you were faint-hearted you would probably faint in the kitchens, and if you faint
ed in the kitchens you would probably become part of lunch.

  10 For lots of information about Narled and his family read The Floods 2: Playschool.

  11 Grusom was wrong in this case. He was not a genius. He was actually totally barking mad but really, really clever at making people think he was brilliant. Don’t try this at home because eventually you will be found out and locked up in a rubber room with no sharp objects and only a big pink ant called Andrew for company.

  12 Many weird things happened there during the day, too. The most weird thing to have happened was that on Tuesday 18 March, 276 BC, nothing weird happened at all. This has never happened again.

  13 There are only three people who believe this and they all live in the catacombs below the school cemetery. They are absolutely correct.

  14 The twins’ extra-sensory powers were not very advanced and consisted of going up to people or concrete lumps and asking them if they’d seen Grusom.

  15 As well as years of experience, Grusom had days, weeks and hours of experience. Although he was as mad as a snake that had cut itself shaving, Grusom knew lots of very clever stuff.

  16 Which he had recently taught himself following the instructions in Junior FSI Weekly. See the back of this book for an extract of this top secret magazine.

  17 Apart from the legendary John Lennon ‘Ticket to Ride’ – which the great singer had once bought to travel into central Liverpool to get fish and chips for his auntie – the world’s most expensive bus ticket was the incredibly rare Tristan da Cunha ‘Tuppeny Pink’, of which there are only two known examples. The one in Professor Open-Graves’s pocket, if genuine, would have been the third one.

  18 There are 287 jokes in the FSI Handbook . They are designed to put people at their ease in horrible and stressful circumstances, such as seeing dead bodies, bits of dead bodies or buckets of blood, or watching Big Brother . Every single one of the 287 jokes is rubbish.

  19 The fact there is a bike shed at Quicklime College is much weirder than there being a graveyard. There is only the one track in the entire valley – which is much too steep for bikes – and that track goes from nowhere to nowhere. Also, witches and wizards wouldn’t be seen dead, or alive for that matter, on a bike. Quicklime’s has a bike shed simply because they are special secret places in most schools that children go behind to do things they are not supposed to do. Use your imagination …

  20 Grusom made a mental note to ring the Guinness Book of Records when the case was over.

  21 Stealing all their blood was number 286 on the Top One Thousand Most Popular Ways to Kill People.

  22 See the back of the book for ordering information and instructions on how to make an eco-friendly substitute.

  23 Although Merlinmary had done a spell on Grusom to make him forget the kidnapping, it hadn’t worked because he had had his eyes crossed at the time.

  24 This also meant the deputy could wear lots of dark eye make-up without anyone laughing at him.

  25 As we shall see later, this was completely untrue. What the Belgian Police had seen was a cunningly disguised hologram created by the Hearse Whisperer.

  26 This made things even worse because, as everyone knows, ‘Being in stitches’ is FSI joke number 92.

  27 Actually, Nerlin was a prince, but at the time he and Mordonna met, his princeliness was totally obfuscated (oh, for goodness sake, look it up in a dictionary). All that, however, is another story.

  28 For their story you will have to read The Floods 3: Home & Away.

  29 There are no biology lessons at Evil Spy School, otherwise the Hearse Whisperer would have known that no one grows on trees – except reality show contestants.

  30 The magnifying glass, not the room, though she did turn a whole house inside out once, which made everyone fall out of bed into the street just as a huge bus was passing by. That won her the Most Inventive Way of Killing Someone medal at the Seriously Evil Spy Awards in 2002.

  31 See The Floods 3: Home & Away.

  32 You can find out more about Winchflat’s Zoomy Thing in The Floods 4: Survivor. In fact, if you don’t read it, all this stuff here will probably be so confusing, you’d better stop reading this book right now and go and lie down in a dark room with a wet towel over your eyes. If you can’t find a towel use a wet cat

  33 Quite what Lord Clacton was hiding from in a dry sandy ghost town in the Sahara when he could have been back at Castle Clacton is something that cannot be revealed.

  34 Don’t you dare think anything so disgusting. The three beans were wriggling around in her belly button, tangled up in a bit of fluff they had found there.

  35 See The Floods 2: Playschool.

  36 They should have been Belgian, but we’ve probably had enough Belgian jokes already.

  37 Vampire Octopuses are actually squid – check them out on Google. They are real and look terrifying and you don’t want to know what the twins feed Twinkletoes.

  38 Just to make sure nothing went wrong, Winchflat had a security system in one corner of his brain that constantly kept a protective watch over his little sister.

  39 It is a well-known fact that if you put yoghurt, whatever flavour, anywhere near torpedoes, it makes them very, very unstable. Prunes have the same effect on humans.

  40 For all you sad losers who haven’t been bright enough to read any of the earlier Floods books, Mordonna always wears very dark sunglasses because anyone – human, wizard or animal – who looks into her eyes falls helplessly in love with her. When she puts her sunglasses back on, the spell is broken, until next time.

  41 See the back of this book for some more of the thirteen school mottos. They aren’t all there because some of them are too rude and dangerous for you to read.

  42 At the Brussels University of Brussels Sprouts And Other Cabbagey Things, there are over two thousand professors.

  43 As I have mentioned chocolate digestive biscuits three times now, I am hoping when this book comes out the company who make the biscuits will send me a MASSIVE box of them because they are my favourite biscuit.

  44 Four times.

  45 The highest honour in Transylvania Waters depends on the day of the week and what mood the King is in. You might get a photo of a huge gold medal or you might get a pair of baggy tights with ‘WELL DONE’ embroidered on the bottom in big red letters. See the back of the book for more Transylvania Waters Honours.

  46 Or would she?

  47 Yes, I know it should say they lived happily ever after, but that would be too exciting and reckless for Mr and Mrs Davenport.

  48 See The Floods 4: Survivor.

  The Floods

  Random House

  HOW TO LIVE FOREVER

  The Floods 6: The Great Outdoors