Floods 10 (6 page)

‘Well, where else can we stand?' said Maldegard.

‘Inside Yggdrasil,' said Hildebrande. ‘Come on,
I think it's probably tea time, and anyway the old widows will be along soon with pies and socks and chocolate. If you like I could send a young goblin along and ask them to bring extras of everything for you.'

Inside Yggdrasil's trunk was not so much the inside of a tree trunk as a small door opening onto a staircase leading down into the ground. At the bottom of the stairs there was a large cave lit with oil lamps, and around the cave were a whole lot of very comfortable sofas.

‘I say, everyone,' said Hildebrande, holding up his hand. ‘We have a couple of visitors.'

‘Shall we send someone along to the village to get the old ladies to bring extras of everything?' said one of the goblins.

‘Already done,' said Hildebrande. ‘Young Ogflat has gone.'

‘I'll put the kettle on,' said another goblin. ‘You two ladies come and sit by the fire and dry out. You look a bit damp and muddy.'

‘We are,' said Maldegard.

‘Would you like some warm cardigans?' said a third goblin. ‘We could knit you a couple in a flash. I think ours'd be too small for thee.'

The two women looked anxious. They wondered if the goblins knew that cardigans were illegal in Transylvania Waters, though the mention of them took Edna Hulbert back to her old home in Acacia Avenue. She had left a whole wardrobe full of cardigans back there and still thought about them from time to time, especially the one with the reindeer knitted into the back.
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‘You'm probably wonderin' if we know cardigans be illegal in Transylvania Waters, isn't you?' said the third goblin. ‘Yes, we do, s'why we keeps knitting them. We'm the Naughty Goblins. We actually hates cardigans, as anyone in their right mind do, but 'cause we've been told we casn't knit 'em, we'm making as many as we can. On the
full moon we creeps out and hangs them in trees. It scares the willies out of the locals.'

‘Yes,' said another goblin, who may or may not have been the same goblin as the one who had said she would put the kettle on. ‘We are like Anarchist Goblins. It is our role to disagree with everythin'.'

‘No, tisn't,' said another goblin.

‘Nice one, Spudly,' said an older goblin, holding out his hand to Maldegard and Edna. ‘I am Nedwin, the sort-of King of our small group.'

Nedwin explained that his people had originally been a lot taller and lived above ground. There had been thousands of them spread across the world, but like witches and wizards, they too had been persecuted by the Knights Intolerant, not because they could do magic like the wizards, but because they had six toes on each foot – which, as everyone knows, meant they were probably in league with the Devil.

‘We wasn't, but the Knights Intolerant bain't called intolerant for nuffink,' said Nedwin. ‘They refused to believe us, so we was forced to flee.'

‘Couldn't you have just removed your extratoes?' said Maldegard.

‘We tried to, but they just keeps growin' back,' said Nedwin.

‘In the middle of our foreheads,' said an old goblin with a toe in the middle of her forehead.

Nearly all of Nedwin's ancestors had been caught by the Knights and converted into organic compost. Less than fifty had managed to reach Transylvania Waters. They thought they were finally safe, but then all the witches and wizards had turned up and, rather than risk being turned into something slimy, they had gone underground.

‘By the time we discovered that wizards was our friends, we'd been living down here so long that we had shrunk,' said Nedwin.

‘But why?' Maldegard asked, banging her head on a stalactite and answering her own question.

The old ladies arrived with pies, chocolate and socks. Over tea, Maldegard and Edna explained what they were doing.

‘Are you doing underground too?' several
goblins asked. ‘Only there be far more down here than there be up there, you know, underground tunnels and lakes and caves, and they be better than anything up there. Do help yourselves to more socks.'

‘You mean they go out beyond the borders of Transylvania Waters?'

‘Oh no, everything stops one centimetre from the border. Every tunnel and every cave do end with an impenetrable wall of enchanted diamond that nothing, not even magic, can go through.'

‘Wow,' said Edna.

‘They were all sealed off to prevent an invasion.'

‘So how can there be lots more beneath our country if nothing goes beyond the borders?' Maldegard asked.

‘That's easy,' said Nedwin. ‘Up there be only one ground level – lakes, rivers, fields, all that sort of stuff – but down here there be many different levels. In some places there be as many as eleventy. I have heard tell there be a level so deep underground that you can feel the heat from the centre of the earth and
dry your laundry in two minutes just by dropping it on the floor.'

‘You haven't explored them all?' said Edna.

‘Well, every time one of us boldly goes off where no goblins have goed before, they never seems to come back,' said Nedwin. ‘Twenty-seven of our people have gone in the past two years alone, and goodness knows how many others before that. So as there be only nineteen of us left, we can'ts afford to lose no one else.'

A big discussion followed on what might have happened to all the other goblins. There were rumours of a terrible one-eyed cyclops that lived on goblin flesh.

‘My friend says there's a terrible two-eyed bicyclops that do eat their clothes too,' said Nedwin.

There were dozens of stories and they were all horrible. The list of rumours included:

• A race of Stone Age Accountants who crushed their victims to death with their heavy rock-counting stones.
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• A race of Stone Age Accountants who bore their victims to death with their mysterious spells, which sound like they are speaking the same language as their victims but in fact are making up new words as they go along.
  ¹⁸
  
• Flying goldfish that forever search for water. They throw their victims to the ground and suck every drop of moisture out of them with big squishy wet lips.
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• Weremoles, which are like werewolves that live underground.
  
• Seventy-two Welsh coal miners who got lost many, many years ago before Transylvania Waters's caves were sealed from the outside world. They sing to their victims until they run away looking for weremoles or flying goldfish or accountants or poison.
  
• A very old Belgian Inspector of Mines who got lost while looking for a group of Welsh coal miners. So far he has not found them.
  
• Lots of lost goblins, LEGO, pens and reading glasses.
  
• All of the above.
  
• Tuesday.
  

‘One eye, two eyes, whatever,' said Nedwin. ‘The one thing we does know is that the creature is called Graham.'

‘I would really like to go exploring and that,' said Spudly, ‘'specially in the Caves of Huge Darkness, but I ain't allowed.'

‘Are the Caves of Huge Darkness real?' said Maldegard. ‘Everyone thinks they're made up, like fairy-story stuff.'

‘Well, my dear,' Nedwin replied, ‘the whole of Transylvania Waters be such an enchanting and magical place that it's all kind of fairy-story stuff, bain't it?'

‘I suppose it is,' said Maldegard. ‘Do you know where the caves are?'

‘Oh yes, but surely you doesn't want to go there, does you?' said Nedwin.

‘Absolutely,' said Maldegard. ‘My beloved husband will be delighted ten times over to know they actually exist. He is away in New York at the Quicklime College summer camp and I think it's making him rather depressed. Finding the Caves of Huge Darkness would cheer him up no end.'

‘But what about them Welsh Miners and the Stone Age Accountants and Graham – bain't you frighteneded?'

‘I think they all sound ridiculous,' said Maldegard.

‘Well, what about all our people who went exploring and din't never come back?'

‘Maybe they just got lost.'

‘Or maybe,' said Edna, who always looked on the bright side of life, ‘they found somewhere nicer to live.'

Nedwin said he hadn't thought of that, though he couldn't imagine anywhere nicer than their damp cave under the wonderful Yggdrasil. He agreed, however, that young Spudly could take them using an ancient map that he thought might possibly perhaps though not definitely be fairly likely to be a bit accurate or else wildly inaccurate which was more likely on account of no one who had used it had ever come back.

‘But 'tis the only map we've got,' he said. ‘So it has to be better than nothin'.'

‘Not necessarily,' said Edna.

Nedwin agreed.

‘Whatever,' said Maldegard. ‘We'll set off first thing in the morning.'

‘I imagined that if they were real, then the
Caves of Huge Darkness would be below the cellars of Castle Twilight itself,' said Maldegard.

‘I think they are,' said Spudly, ‘but the only entrance we know about is high up in the mountains, two days' walk from here.'

‘If none of you have been there,' said Edna, ‘how do you know that?'

‘Look,' said Nedwin, and showed them a cave painting that was obviously tens of thousands of years old. Edna took a photo.

The rumoured Caves of Huge Darkness were originally supposed to have been created by the first wizards to live in Transylvania Waters when they fled there to escape persecution from the Knights Intolerant, who were determined to rid the world of every single wizard and witch by the most painful methods possible. The caves were to be the final hiding place if they were ever invaded. So they put the entrance right at the top of a mountain, which is the last place anyone would expect to find a way into a cave that was deep underground. However, the Knights Intolerant never managed to reach Transylvania Waters, so the caves were eventually forgotten, and whenever anyone mentioned them no one was particularly interested.

‘I thought we were going to travel through the lovely countryside naming waterfalls and mountain streams and pretty dingly dells and fairy places,' said Edna when she and Maldegard were tucked up in bed in Yggdrasil's finest guest bedroom, ‘not creeping around in dark tunnels looking for places that we don't even know for sure actually exist.'

‘We can do the pretty places later,' said Maldegard. ‘This will be much more exciting.'

Edna Hulbert wasn't sure she wanted exciting. Admittedly, she hadn't had a lot of it in her own life, but she'd seen what happened to other people when they got excited, and it often ended in tears. On the other hand, leaving her safe suburban home and wardrobe full of cardigans to go off to live in a huge castle with a family of wizards in a remote valley was probably more exciting than most people even dream about, never mind experience. Part of her thought that was probably more than enough excitement for one lifetime, but another part thought if she had handled that OK, and she had to admit she was happier now than she had ever been back in Acacia Avenue, then what the hell, she was game for anything.