Floods 9 Page 9

‘What?’ Aubergine asked.

  ‘Well, the Winchflat boy could hear you speak too, couldn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So now he can hear you impersonating a yak having its breakfast, can’t he?’

  ‘Damn!’ cursed Aubergine and hit the mute button on his remote.

  ‘Let’s hope it’s not too late,’ said Chrysanthemum.

  There was no way they could know. On the one hand, having switched between the four bugs should have made Winchflat think his machine wasn’t working properly, so he might think the audio was playing up too. On the other hand, Winchflat had programmed his brain to totally reject the possibility that anything he invented could ever go wrong and Aubergine suspected that Winchflat would have analysed the sounds and discovered they were genuine yak-having-lunch noises.

  ‘I think the only thing to do is switch on all four devices at the same time,’ said Winchflat, ‘and head for Transylvania Waters as quickly as we can. I know a secret way into Castle Twilight and once we get inside, there are hundreds of derelict and deserted rooms where we can hide for as long as we want. I mean, right under their noses is the last place they will ever think of looking.’62

  ‘I was kind of hoping we could live in a little cottage by a stream in the country with a lovely old half-timbered barn full of safes where we could keep all our money,’ said Chrysanthemum.

  ‘And we will, my darling, but right now we need a safe haven where we can rest and plan our future,’ said Aubergine.

  So they got themselves some new disguises and joined a coach party of jolly Belgian tourists on holiday from the famous cabbage-pickling factories of Bruges. Two days later they arrived at the coach park by the entrance of the tunnel into Transylvania Waters. The tunnel had been deliberately made too narrow to allow anything larger than a mediumsized car to go down it, but as luck would have it, there was a huge fleet of Valla’s Executive Taxi Cabs waiting to take the tourists through the tunnel into paradise and on to their hotel.

  * * *

  61 Which for Winchflat means just a tiny little bit annoyed.

  62 Except for Satanella, who spent a lot of time in front of mirrors looking under her nose. Being a dog she had a highly sensitive sense of smell, and being hairy she got a lot of her dinner stuck round her mouth, so under her own nose was a very interesting and exciting place.

  When the taxis arrived at the hotel, Aubergine and Chrysanthemum slipped quietly away into the woods behind the building. Aubergine Wealth knew the forests of Transylvania Waters like the back of his hand. In fact, he actually had a map of them tattooed on the back of his hand. Whenever he grew homesick as he had travelled the world, all he had to do was look at his hands and he felt happy again.63 The Wealths were an old Transylvanian family who could trace their ancestors to the very first settlers who had set up the country. They were one of the original Ten Families who had created the enchanted country to escape the Knights Intolerant, who had organised a world-wide persecution of witches and wizards in the very-long-time-ago century.

  As a boy, Aubergine had scoured the forests with a metal detector searching for lost money. He knew every twist and turn, every cave and secret place there was to know, and he also knew a shortcut to Castle Twilight.

  Up in his laboratory, Winchflat was going crazy. According to his sensors, Aubergine Wealth was in four places at the same time.

  ‘And only one of them can be the right one,’ he complained, twiddling all the knobs on the console.

  ‘Or none of them,’ Betty suggested.

  ‘I’d guess that Betty’s right,’ said Ffiona. ‘I’d guess that Mr Wealth and his wife discovered your tracking device and somehow made three copies of it and then put them, plus the original one, into four other life forms while they got clean away with all their money.’

  ‘Girls, please,’ said Winchflat. ‘Might I suggest you go and play with your Barbie dolls and leave all the technical stuff to people who are experts.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Betty. ‘So where are they, clever-clogs?’

  ‘They’re in Kazakhstan heading towards Uzbekistan,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘And this one?’ said Betty, pointing at one of the screens. ‘They are crashing round in a small pet shop eating mice.’

  ‘And this one?’ said Festival. ‘They seem to have photocopied themselves and are both lying in ditches sleeping off hangovers.’

  ‘Maybe they haven’t photocopied themselves,’ Betty laughed. ‘Maybe they’re still drunk and are seeing double.’

  Winchflat went bright red. Not only was he angry that his machine seemed to be broken, but he had to admit to himself – but not her – that Ffiona’s suggestion sounded like the most likely explanation, which meant that he didn’t have the faintest idea where Aubergine and his wife might be.

  Oh God, he thought very quietly. They could be anywhere.

  Which of course they were.

  And the anywhere was much nearer than he would have ever thought.

  ‘I think we must assume that they have outwitted you, darling,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘But . . .’ Winchflat began.

  It was the first time in his life that one of his inventions hadn’t worked perfectly. Either they had outsmarted his tracking equipment or the equipment itself had broken down. Both options were unthinkable. Winchflat felt a great wave of depression sweep over him. His wife, Maldegard, put her arm round his shoulder, but there was no consoling him.

  ‘I am not programmed to fail,’ he said.

  ‘None of us are perfect, darling,’ said Maldegard.

  ‘Except the Grand Master Wizard,’ said Betty.64

  Meanwhile, Aubergine and Chrysanthemum were strolling peacefully through the forest towards the castle. Exquisite Scarlet Vampire Butterflies65 fluttered around them and the air was filled with the delicate scent of deadly nightshade, which is always in full flower in Transylvania Waters. They each invited a butterfly to bite them and then drifted along singing old hippy songs.

  Aubergine made an unusual hippy. His love for the finer things in life – money, more money and lots of money – was too deeply embedded in his soul for a mere butterfly bite to override. Every fibre of his being was devoted to wealth, more wealth and lots of wealth. His blood was gold-coloured and his sweat smelled of crisp new banknotes, the smell that had first captured Chrysanthemum’s heart.

  They came to the end of the footpath through the forest and there was a tall stone wall. They were at the back of Castle Twilight – not just the back, but the unfashionable part of it, where the whole place was shrouded in permanent semi-darkness cast by the huge towers at the back of the castle. Aubergine took Chrysanthemum’s hand and led her along the wall until they came to a small door that was hidden behind a curtain of poison ivy.

  ‘My great-grandmother planted that,’ said Aubergine, ‘to hide the only entrance into the castle grounds apart from the main gate. I think one of my cousins still comes here to feed it and make sure it is still covering the door.’

  ‘Doesn’t it give you a terrible rash if you touch it?’ Chrysanthemum asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Aubergine and, reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a silver spray bottle. ‘Unless you cover yourself with my great-grandmother’s special spray.’

  They covered themselves. Aubergine unlocked the door and they crept into the gardens that surrounded the castle.

  ‘Follow me,’ said Aubergine, ‘and whatever you do, don’t eat anything. Those beautiful flowers over there may look like chocolate. They may smell like chocolate and they may appear to be waving their petals at you inviting you to eat them, but one tiny nibble and you will turn instantly into a Belgian accountant with a really bad limp and an enormous purple and yellow boil throbbing on your neck. Within an hour the boil will have grown seven times bigger than your head and then it will burst and you will be drowned in a flood of your own pus.’

  Chrysanthemum looked as if she was going to throw up.66

  ‘Though of course,’
Aubergine continued, ‘if you were a Belgian accountant with a really bad limp you’d probably be quite relieved to be drowned.’

  There were other equally terrible plants. There was the Ferocious Weaving Grass, which could grab you by the ankle and weave you into a basket full of very old herrings, and there was the Very Naughty Prickle Bush, which does such unmentionable things to its victims that they are unmentionable.

  By picking their way carefully through the garden they finally reached the back wall of the castle itself. The wall towered above them, vanishing in places into the thick white clouds. The whole place had a really sad, depressing atmosphere about it, as if time itself had given up here and moved on to somewhere else.

  ‘Can we get out of here?’ said Chrysanthemum. ‘I feel myself becoming really sad and depressed.’

  ‘Don’t worry, my darling,’ said Aubergine. ‘It’s just a spell my wonderful great-grandmother put here to keep people away. Once we go inside the castle the spell will lift. You might still be really sad and depressed, but it will be a different really sad and depressed and it will be for quite different reasons.’

  Aubergine walked along the huge wall for a few moments, pausing now and then to slip his finger into a gap between the stones. Finally he stopped, pushed his whole hand into a gap and pushed. A large stone slid aside, revealing a small stone staircase.

  They were inside Castle Twilight, right under the noses of the Floods themselves. Of all the places in the world they could have run to, this was the closest they could have been to their pursuers.

  Almost.

  ‘Come on,’ said Aubergine, taking Chrysanthemum’s hand and leading her through the darkness up the narrow stairs.

  The stairs went round and round up in a spiral until they could go no higher. There was a heavy wooden door in front of them with a tiny beam of light shining into the darkness through a keyhole.

  ‘Here we are,’ Aubergine said as he pushed the door open. ‘Perfect safety.’

  But instead of the room Aubergine was expecting – the old, dark, deserted room with its treasure chests and simple oak furniture lit only by a single narrow slit in the masonry of the far wall – they found themselves in a bright white space bathed in sunlight.

  Nor was the room deserted.

  Aubergine Wealth was dumbfounded. His family had created their secret route in and out of Castle Twilight, the hidden gate in the outer wall, the secret stone into the castle itself with the spiral staircase leading up into the castle attics and then a long corridor to the secret tower, and in all that time they had never shared the secret with anyone outside their family. The Wealths had used the route and the hidden sanctuary for generations. Whenever there had been any financial hanky-panky in Transylvania Waters, a Wealth had usually been involved, and their hideaway right in the heart of the castle had saved their skin on quite a few occasions. He couldn’t speak for any of his relations, but Aubergine Wealth hadn’t been up to their sanctuary for a long time, certainly not since the Floods had reclaimed the throne.

  The person who was sitting in the red armchair in the middle of the room was not one of his relations.

  ‘I thought you’d come here, Auby One,’ said Mordonna, using her childhood nickname for him and also making a really bad Star Wars pun.67

  Aubergine was speechless.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your wife?’ Mordonna continued as Aubergine struggled for words.

  Aubergine Wealth and Mordonna had known each other since childhood. Because of their incredible skill in being very rich, the Wealth family – who gave their name to the state of being very rich – had been one of the few old Transylvania Waters families that Mordonna’s evil father had not persecuted. In fact, they had thrived under his rule, a rule that had tended to overlook a lot of fairly illegal things that were now being dealt with by King Nerlin Flood and his counsellors.

  ‘Are you going to turn us in?’ said Aubergine.

  ‘Turn you in? Turn you in to what?’ Mordonna laughed. ‘No, no, no old friend, but I am going to put you out of your misery.’

  ‘What misery?’ said Aubergine nervously. ‘In the past few months, I’ve made several billion dollars and fallen in love and got married. The first thing I took for granted, of course. Making fortunes is my natural talent. It’s genetic, all my ancestors did it. The second thing was totally unexpected and more wonderful that I could have ever imagined.’

  ‘More wonderful than the billions?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Yes,’ said Aubergine without a second thought.

  Oh bugger, was his second thought when he realised that although he would have said the right thing in his wife’s eyes, and probably in Mordonna’s too, it might not have been strictly true.

  ‘Did you really think you could outwit all of us?’ Mordonna began. ‘I know you were very clever, the way you kept throwing my dear Winchflat off the scent, but it was all irrelevant.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We have known each other since we were children, haven’t we?’ said Mordonna.

  Aubergine nodded and began to look worried.

  Mordonna had spent her childhood locked away in Castle Twilight. Her father had kept her a virtual prisoner, imprisoned in a tiny castle with a mere two hundred and seventy-six rooms and a minute seventy-three-acre garden to play in. Her only friends had been the castle rats and a caterpillar called Brian, who had changed into a butterfly and deserted her, and the young Aubergine Wealth who, unknown to the king, had befriended the lonely princess.

  ‘So I think you’ll agree that we know each other pretty well, don’t we?’

  Aubergine nodded again and looked worried again and again and then some more.

  ‘In fact, I’d say I probably know you better than you know yourself,’ said Mordonna. ‘Being as how I know lots of stuff about emotions and feelings and you know more about money type things.’

  Aubergine stopped nodding. He just stood staring at his feet while Chrysanthemum held his hand and took over the looking nervous bit.

  ‘What I mean,’ Mordonna explained, ‘is that for all of Winchflat’s wonderful devices and all your clever subterfuges I knew all along that you would eventually end up here.’

  ‘But even I didn’t know that,’ said Aubergine. ‘I mean, I hadn’t planned to. We just sort of made our escape up as we went along.’

  ‘No you didn’t,’ said Mordonna. ‘You were always going to end up in your family’s secret hideaway. I was extremely surprised when you suddenly fell in love and got a wife. That really threw me. I had always assumed that if you ever did get married it would be to a very big cash register. I did have a small Plan B on hand in case you didn’t come here, but thankfully it wasn’t needed.’

  Aubergine knew better than to ask Mordonna what her Plan B was. He had painful childhood memories of being confined in very small electrically powered boxes with very sharp bits when he had refused to share his lollies with her.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Aubergine asked. ‘Do we have to give all the money back?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mordonna, ‘that and more.’

  ‘More? How much more?’

  ‘Well, you know the money you’ve hidden away that absolutely no one knows about?’ Mordonna began.

  Aubergine’s mouth hung open as his thoughts raced round the world visiting all the secret stashes he had made over the years. As he realised later, this was about the worst thing he could have done, because Mordonna was one of the greatest mind readers of all time. Not only could she read his mind as it went from cache to cache, she could note them down in her head and locate them all to within five centimetres with her built-in GPS.

  ‘Well, I say no one knows about it.’ Mordonna smiled. ‘Guess what?’

  Aubergine Wealth collapsed onto a chair and buried his head in his hands.

  Mordonna pressed a button and the middle of the room gently floated down into the room below, where Winchflat was making a few final adjustments to his mas
sive Toilet-Roll-Magnet-With-Kitchen-Roll-And-Tissue-Attachments-Machine which was now an Every-Single-Cent-Aubergine-Wealth-Has-Magnet.

  ‘Would you like to press the button?’ Mordonna asked Aubergine. ‘Kind of say a personal goodbye?’

  Aubergine did a goldfish impersonation, which meant he stood there with his mouth opening and closing and no sound coming out, just a few bubbles.

  Chrysanthemum, who hadn’t married him for his money, but had fallen deeply in love with it very soon after, shrugged her shoulders.

  Oh well, she thought, easy come, easy go.

  Not my lovely husband, she added in case anyone was reading her mind – which of course Mordonna was. I just mean the money.

  Then something rather wonderful and touchy-feely and all hippyish happened. Mordonna, one of the world’s most powerful witches, clicked her fingers and Aubergine Wealth was overcome with a powerful desire for a Tofu Burger with Bean Sprouts and Homeopathic Mayonnaise. He yearned to have flowers in his hair and move to the country and float over fields of buttercups eating strawberries covered in carob chocolate substitute. Chrysanthemum’s recent conversion to the Wonderful World of Wealth faded away and she was re-overwhelmed by a love of pink things and soft faux-fur cuddliness. 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, but without the lizard bit.

  Chrysanthemum, who never went anywhere without a bunch of flowers, wove them into her husband’s hair and, holding hands, they pressed the button together.

  All over the world Aubergine’s soon-to-beex-fortune began to move.68 The three hundred cardboard boxes under Aubergine’s bed emptied. So did the enormous sock inside the plastic bag under the rock on Inaccessible Island that was 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. The rock actually rolled down the beach into the sea, which made the Rockhoppers really, really angry because they didn’t have a rock to hop onto anymore.