Floods 11 Read online

  First of all, the organisers went through the contestants and their assistants and supporters to nominate the three judges. Letitia Puddle was chosen immediately because all the organisers thought she reminded them of their dead grandmothers and also, apart from Betty, she had been the only visitor who had asked for seconds at dinner. The second judge was the Mongolian Minister of Culture, who was so overwhelmed by Letitia that he spent the entire contest staring gooey-eyed at her.

  ‘And as far as I am concerned,’ Letitia said, ‘the gooeyer an eye is the better.’

  The third and final judge was the previous year’s winner with the wonderful Fried Snow recipe, Natashskyalakova Korpsikov, who had died six months earlier.

  Two of the contestants objected, saying the judges were bound to show unfair bias towards Betty. They were immediately disqualified and all their wooden spoons and aprons were confiscated before they were deported in an ancient rusty truck, which fell into a very big snowdrift, and they weren’t discovered until a helpful bit of global warming thawed them out three years later.30

  For her entree, Betty created her famous Golden Bell Frog Croquettes in a Frog Spawn Sauce, which was unique in the fact that the spawn she used was from a completely different species of frog to the one she used for the croquettes.

  ‘After all,’ she said in her interview later that day on Mongolian TV, ‘it would be environmentally irresponsible to use the same species for both, on account of them both being endangered.’

  The best the other contestants could offer were boring by comparison and contained not one single endangered thing at all.

  Betty’s main dish was also a triumph and probably the first recipe in the world to contain motorcycle parts. Her Slow-cooked Carburettor stuffed with a Foie Gras of Woolly Mammoth’s Livers served with a Deep Fried Puree of Geography Teacher and Chips was so well received that it all got eaten before the TV people could get near enough to film it.

  Several of the other contestants who managed to grab a spoonful were so overwhelmed by its brilliance that they withdrew from the competition.

  To say the whole competition came down to the dessert would be completely wrong. Betty was already so far ahead that even if someone else had served up a million dollars on toast they could not have won.31

  Betty created her most dangerous dessert, the highly acclaimed Not Dead Redback, Tarantula and Other Assorted Deadly Spiders Ice-Cream Rapide. This was a VERY dangerous dessert to order because if you got the timing wrong, you died. It was made by freezing deadly spiders in ice-cream – your choice of strawberry, vanilla or chocolate. The spiders were not actually killed by the freezing process, just sent to sleep. If you ate the dessert quickly, before the spiders could thaw out, everything was fine because the acid inside your stomach would get them before they could get you. If you ate too slowly, though, say you had a bit of a chat to someone with a mouthful of ice-cream,32 or the ice-cream had begun to melt, then the spiders would wake up before you could swallow them and make you dead, and if you think a poisonous spider’s bite is very painful, just try and imagine how it would feel if they bit the inside of your mouth, especially that soft floppy bit under your tongue, which is where the spiders run and hide.

  The American contestant who was programmed to eat anything with lots of fat and/or sugar in it grabbed Betty’s dessert and wolfed it down. There was, however, one spider left in the bowl, which the contestant got as he licked the bowl clean.

  It got him.

  Betty was declared the winner.

  She was given the winner’s sash, which was woven out of the finest Mongolian twigs, and the Champion’s Crown, which was woven out of the finest Mongolian twigs,33 and the honour of having Transylvania Waters host the next year’s Cheffie Olympics, which probably meant they would be hosting it forever as it would be very unlikely to be won by any other country ever again.

  So Mordonna and Nerlin agreed that Betty and Ffiona would be allowed to open The Devil’s Kitchen, which came as a surprise to no one, except possibly Ffiona, who still couldn’t get over the old-fashioned human ideas of fair play and not cheating.

  Betty flew all over the world finding the finest ingredients. She did most of her flying at night, because only her parents and Ffiona and Merlin knew she could fly and they all agreed it was probably better to keep it a secret for now. Of course this secret became one of those secrets that everyone knows about, because more and more people kept catching glimpses of Betty zipping by in the moonlight.

  ‘What was that?’ the Transylvania Waters locals would say as Betty flashed by the window while they were bat-watching one night.

  ‘Bit big for a bat. Unless is was an Umpire Bat.34 They’re pretty big,’ their wives would reply.

  ‘If I didn’t know better,’ the locals would say, ‘I’d swear it was young Princess Betty flying off round the world to find the finest ingredients for her restaurant.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking too much strong coffee,’ their wives would reply. ‘I think you’d better go to bed.’

  ‘I’m not sleepy,’ the locals would reply. ‘I think the coffee’s keeping me awake.’

  And Betty did find the most amazing ingredients – from the rarest berries that only grew in one tiny gully near the top of Mount Everest to the Tartan Sea Slug that lived in two tiny rock pools on the remote island of St Kilda in the far Outer Hebrides. She made friends with a family of otters, who became so tame they would let her clip their toenails for her wonderful Otter and Postman’s Toenail Pie. The postmen never grew that tame and Betty could only clip their nails when they were fast asleep.

  She even dabbled in a strange hippy gardening ritual that involved burying a cow’s horn stuffed with cow poo on a full moon in the garden behind the restaurant, leaving it there all winter and then digging it up again to put the bio-organic solar-powered enchanted cow poo on her veggie garden.35

  ‘I might be wrong, darling,’ said Mordonna when Betty and Ffiona told her about it, ‘but this burying a cow’s horn on the night of the full moon and digging it up a year later thing – aren’t you supposed to stuff the horn with some special bio-dynamic mumbo-jumbo powder or cow poo or bacon or something?’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Betty, ‘but there wasn’t anywhere to put it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the horn was full of cow,’ said Betty.

  ‘Right,’ said Mordonna. ‘I think that’s probably where you went wrong. I think you’re supposed to remove the horn from the cow before you bury it.’

  ‘Oh, that’s very environmentally friendly, isn’t it?’ said Betty. ‘Cutting the poor cow’s horn off.’

  ‘I think the cow would be dead,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Well, mine wasn’t,’ said Betty, ‘and I had a hell of a job burying it. It kept leaping up out of the hole. I had to park a van on top of it in the end.’

  ‘I wondered why that old van down the bottom of the garden kept bouncing around,’ said Ffiona. ‘It stopped eventually, though.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Betty. ‘When we moved the van and dug up the cow a couple of months later to see how it was all going, it was dead. The van was good, though – it had grown two extra wheels.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ffiona, ‘we were thinking we might convert it into a travelling café so we could take our food out to people in the country.’

  There was enough room at the end of the garden behind the teashop for a special vegetable patch. In fact, after Betty had done a Bigger Garden Spell, which moved fences and houses and things about, she had a very big garden to grow things. Then she spent two weeks searching the Alchemist’s Museum, which occupied a neglected wing of Castle Twilight, looking through ancient records for information about old, forgotten plants and recipes that had been used in witches’ potions in the Olden Days.

  ‘Once a month,’ she said to Ffiona, ‘I’d like to have an Olden Days Night in which our customers can eat meals that haven’t been made for hundreds of years with long
-forgotten ingredients and ancient potions. It’d be brilliant.’

  ‘But isn’t there a reason they haven’t been made for so long?’ said Ffiona.

  ‘We’ll find out, won’t we?’ said Betty.

  ‘Sounds a bit dangerous to me.’

  ‘Well, that’s why people will pay a lot of money to come,’ Betty explained. ‘It’ll be an exciting gamble. They won’t know what will happen to them. It could be something small, like a horn growing in the middle of their forehead, or it could be something huge, like turning into a giant cyclops or a gorgon.’

  ‘Or they could turn into something dead,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Yes, but they’ll have to sign a waiver before they come,’ said Betty. ‘They won’t be able to sue us.’

  ‘Of course they won’t, not if they’re dead.’

  ‘Look, when will you realise that being dead doesn’t have the same stigma or permanency in Transylvania Waters as it does in the human world?’ said Betty. ‘It’s just a stage us wizards go through.’

  Ffiona had tried to get her head round all the differences between wizards and humans. At first she had just thought wizards were humans who could do magic, but the longer she lived in Transylvania Waters, the more she realised they were a totally different species. They certainly had completely different values and attitudes to life and death and all the bits in between, but there was a lot more to it than that. Humans never really changed, whereas wizards could make two and two add up to Thursday and turn a mouse into an aeroplane if they wanted to, which they seemed to want to quite often. It was all very, very confusing, though Ffiona did have to admit that it was a lot more exciting than life had been back in Acacia Avenue.

  It had taken such a lot of searching to find the Alchemist’s Museum that Betty had been on the point of giving up and just going online and searching through Gurgle.36 In fact, Betty had begun to think it might not even exist and just been a story the old Queen Mother had told her. Nerlin and Mordonna certainly had never heard of it and it was only because Merlin had insisted it did exist, though he had never actually been there, that Betty had kept looking for it and eventually found it. It was more than neglected – it was completely overgrown. The only door into the place was in a back wall of the castle where no one had been for years. They had to hack and burn a very thick tangled jungle of prickly things just to find the door, and when they did, they found it had been bricked and they had to get two men with heavy machinery to open it up again. The Queen Mother said it had been sealed up by King Quatorze, who had been terrified of alchemy after he had a dream where an alchemist in his search for gold, something which the old king had actually been obsessed with, had turned the king’s legs into very big carrots.

  When the bricks were removed, the original door was revealed, a massive oak thing with a large keyhole, and of course no one had the slightest idea where the key might be. Betty closed her eyes, tilted her head down and concentrated. One by one the heavy tumblers inside the lock moved until she was able to push the door open and go inside.

  ‘I’ll just sort of wait here,’ said Ffiona, and a great breeze of ancient stale air drifted out.

  It was the rich smell of old leather-bound books that filled Betty’s brain with a thousand possibilities.

  ‘Yeah, whatever, you go home,’ she said and walked inside.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said an old leather-bound voice.

  ‘What?’ said Betty, who had definitely not expected anyone to be there. ‘Who are you?’

  A thin dark brown man with thin dark brown hair emerged from the shadows.

  ‘I am Britannica,’ he said, ‘the Librarian.’

  ‘I thought this place would be deserted,’ said Betty. ‘I didn’t know there was another way into here.’

  ‘There isn’t,’ said Britannica.

  ‘But this place has been sealed up for, umm, for …’

  ‘Twenty-seven years, four months and five days,’ said the old Librarian.

  ‘And you’ve been in here, all alone all that time?’ said Betty.

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘But how have you survived? I mean, what have you been eating?’

  ‘Fungus,’ said Britannica. ‘Look, I will show you.’

  He led Betty through several gloomy rooms filled ceiling to floor with overflowing bookshelves until they came to a small door. The door led down into a cellar, where the walls ran with water and between the stones were thousands upon thousands of tiny red mushrooms.

  ‘I have eaten nothing but these,’ he said and, pushing his mouth to the stonework, added, ‘and drunk nothing but this.’

  The mushrooms, he explained, were not just any old fungi. These were Alchemist’s Mushrooms that tasted of everything.

  ‘You simply decide what you would like to eat and that is what they taste like. Go on, try it for yourself.’

  Betty thought of strawberries and bit into a mushroom.

  ‘Wow, strawberries!’

  She thought again.

  ‘Wow, café latté with vanilla!’

  And again.

  ‘Wow, more bacon!’ Betty cried. ‘With custard!’

  It was amazing, and Betty realised that the Devil’s Kitchen could produce absolutely anything she or anyone else ever wanted, simply by using the Alchemist’s Mushrooms.

  ‘There is one side effect that maybe isn’t so good,’ said Britannica.

  Betty didn’t dare ask, but she did.

  The old Librarian undid his shirt and in the middle of his chest there was a mouth. Whatever the mouth on his face did, the one on his chest did exactly the same.

  ‘There are two more,’ he said, ‘but I cannot show them to such an innocent young girl as yourself.’

  Betty said she thought there was probably a good chance she could find a spell to get rid of the extra mouths, but Britannica said he doubted it.

  ‘After all,’ he said. ‘I have been here all these years with every alchemy book ever written, except for one book, which was out on loan when I got bricked in. I have read every one of them many times and found no such spell.’

  Betty then brought him up to date with the world outside the library. She told him that the evil King Quatorze had been overthrown and that Merlin’s son, Nerlin, had been restored to the throne and that she, Betty, was Nerlin’s youngest daughter.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ said Britannica, falling to his knees. ‘I am so sorry, Your Highness. I had no idea you were a royal princess, please forgive me.’

  ‘There is nothing to forgive,’ said Betty and helped the old Librarian to his feet. ‘Life is not like that anymore. We are just people like everyone else. Well, apart from being a bit royal and descended from the legendary Merlin and being wizards and therefore a million times more clever than humans, of course.’

  ‘And tell me,’ said Britannica, ‘there was one person I gave my heart to. She is the one who had the missing book out on loan.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Betty. ‘Was this book called Gardening for Alchemists?’

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ said Britannica. ‘It was.’

  ‘So was the lady who borrowed the book called Letitia Puddle?’

  ‘She was and she was the true love of my life,’ said the old Librarian. ‘Oh tell me, please, that she still lives.’

  ‘She does now,’ said Betty, explaining how she had resurrected Letitia and all about the restaurant and how the two of them and a human girl were going to run it and how wonderful it was all going to be. They talked for hours until the night began to fall and then Betty led the old Librarian out into the moonlight, where he fell to his knees again and kissed the earth.

  ‘All these years I have dreamed of the day when I might touch the grass and see the stars again,’ he said.

  Betty focused her mind on the door and locked it, and then taking the old man’s arm, led him back round to the front of the castle and over the road to The Devil’s Kitchen.

  Letitia Puddle was in the upstairs apartment sewing her left e
ar back on after it had fallen into a pot of bones she had been boiling to make stock.

  ‘There’s someone here to see you,’ said Betty.

  Letitia was lost for words as the two ancient sweethearts were reunited. They fell into each other’s arms, which required more sewing of body parts back on.

  Betty tiptoed out of the room and back over to the castle.

  She was a little late, but a few minutes later she joined the rest of the family up on the castle’s tallest tower where they had some nice family time drinking delicious warm blood slurpies, which Betty made for them all with delicious added crushed locust, frozen gristle cubes AND finely ground tyre from a vintage Rolls Royce.

  ‘All’s well that ends well,’ said Nerlin, who was very partial to the odd cliché. ‘Life doesn’t get much better than this.’

  ‘Well, actually,’ said Betty. ‘It does. The Devil’s Kitchen is having its Grand Opening next Tuesday.’

  This is what can happen when you send your dinner into another dimension. Entire galaxies can be flushed away down the Great Space Toilet. So be careful what you do with that awful dinner your granny cooked for you. You could end up wiping out billions of lifeforms. Though, of course, if you eat it, you could end up spending a lot of time on the Great Space Toilet yourself.

  150 Big Ripe Cherries with the stones taken out.

  Another 83 even Bigger Ripe Cherries with the stones taken out.

  A HUGE Juicy Peach with the stone taken out.

  One litre of very runny milk chocolate (with the stones taken out).

  A tube of condensed milk.

  Another tube of condensed milk.

  Yet another tube of condensed milk