Floods 7 (13 page)
Authors: Colin Thompson
âBrilliant.' Morbid and Silent gave each other a high-five.
âWe will form the King Quatorze Humiliation Society,' said the Queen. âAnd turn his stupid new wife into a bouncy castle.'
âOf course, there is another problem,' said Mordonna. âAnd I certainly don't want any of my family risking their lives to deal with it.'
âWhat's that then?' said Nerlin.
âThe Hearse Whisperer.'
âOh, yes, I'd forgotten about her,' said Nerlin. âWinchflat, anything on your sensors?'
âWell, she is either circling in the sky above us,' said Winchflat, âor else there's a moth stuck on my antenna.'
âYou're sure she's not still on Tristan da Cunha?'
âNo, according my printout, she actually came back to Transylvania Waters a little while ago, and then went back to Tristan da Cunha and then left, but I'm not sure where she went next.'
âLet's just go with the moth idea, for the moment,' said Mordonna. âWe've enough to think about slipping back into the country. Besides, if Quenelle is right, we'll have plenty of people prepared to hide us while we work out what to do.'
âWe could always go back and live in Acacia Avenue,' said Betty, who was missing her best friend Ffiona.
âI don't know about everyone else,' said Nerlin, âbut I've had enough of living amongst humans. They're just too weird and difficult.'
Everyone else felt the same, though they
did agree with Betty that their human friends the Hulberts had been OK.
âMother, you are not going to kill the King, are you?' said Mordonna. âIt's not that I like him or would mind him being annihilated or anything like that, but I will not have my children involved in killing things.'
âOh my goodness no,' said the Queen. âHe will end up living in a windowless stone hovel on a tiny remote Scottish island with three sheep, six clumps of grass and the Countess Slab, and they will both live miserably ever after for a very, very, long time with nothing to eat but seaweed and their own hair. No, it's all the stuff that is going to happen to him between now and then that the children can help me with.'
âAnd I'll tell you something,' she added. âIt will sure beat the hell out of Playstation.'
The sun doesn't so much as set over Transylvania Waters as get smothered by its brown smog. Then night falls with a soft thud. A few lamps twinkled in the darkness, going out one by one as
the population went to bed. The silence was really quiet, broken only by the occasional loud pop as a Lake Tarnish fish exploded, having swum too close to the surface.
âThat is the most beautiful darkness I have ever seen,' said Mildred. âThe darkness inside my grave was lovely, but it was nothing compared to this.'
Since the verandah they had sat on at the end of every day in Acacia Avenue had been blasted into dust, the family were sitting together outside Quenelle's cave on a carpet of dried twigs and toadstools. It was the first time in weeks that everyone felt completely relaxed as Transylvania Waters worked its magic on their weary bodies.
Mordonna stirred her warm blood slurpie with a dried nightingale. âWell,' she said, âtomorrow we will go home.'
âBy the way,' said Mildred, as Mordonna blew out the last candle. âI'm going to have a baby.'
1
In Australia they put it in jars and sell it to other people to spread on their toast. I'm not allowed to say what it is in case we get sued, but it rhymes with âMake sure the lid is done up incredibly tight.' This, of course, should say, âMake sure the lid is done up incredibly tightly', but that wouldn't rhyme with Vegemite.
2
If you are somewhere lush and green and it begins to rain and that incredible rich damp smell comes out of the earth and fills the air and you feel something stir deep in your soul, then somewhere in your family tree, maybe hundreds of years ago, you have a relative who came from Transylvania Waters.
3
Her left knee, right ankle and both thumbs.
4
Both elbows, several ribs and nose.
5
The Queen was, of course, referring to Vessel, her old servant and secret love, who the Hearse Whisperer had trapped inside an enchanted birdcage. You can read about this in
The Floods 3: Home & Away.
6
See
The Floods 4: Survivor
to learn how Winchflat built himself a girlfriend and
The Floods 6: The Great Outdoors
to read how he lost her.
7
As everyone knows, the words âchicken' and âflying' don't really belong in the same sentence. So every time the hippies chanted, all the chickens crashed into the trees, losing feathers, dropping eggs everywhere and getting sore heads.
8
Don't try this at home. Actually, don't try it anywhere â especially in the back of a fast-moving vehicle on a bumpy road like my Uncle Frank did. We never did get every last bit of his brains out of the upholstery.
9
The flies were the bright orange ones you only ever see on fresh cowpats, which coincidentally were exactly the same shade of orange as the Cool One's yurt.
10
The Hearse Whisperer had just been on an Anger Management course, but that hadn't really helped stop her hurting baby Claude since she had ended up eating the Anger Management consultant.
11
Of course, being a toddler, baby Claude frequently went to the toilet when he was asleep, but that weighed a lot more than 0.002 grams.
12
Her favourite nasty thing was to make all the feathers fall out of a passing pigeon so that it (a) crashed, and (b) caught a cold. Melting all the cheese on every pizza in the largest supermarket so it ran all over the floor, causing lots of old ladies to break their ankles and massive shopping trolley gridlocks, came a close second.
13
See
The Floods 5: Prime Suspect
.
14
As will be revealed a bit later, the spies who ended up trimming people's infected toenails and verrucas for the rest of their lives were actually the lucky ones.
15
Thermal as in thermal air current, not a thermal vest, though at such altitudes it was extremely cold and some warm clothing would have been very welcome. Scientific tests have shown, however, that huge sea birds cannot fly very well if you dress them in thermal underwear.
16
This, of course, was not his original Hearse-Whisperer-Detector as that had been destroyed in the fire at Acacia Avenue. This was his Hearse-Whisperer-Detector Mark II, which was even more sensitive and could tell if the Hearse Whisperer had farted in an empty room up to 24 hours previously.
17
Which had actually been published, though only in Belgium and Wales (so far).
18
Which, of course, she ALWAYS is.
19
If you have ever been forced to eat gooseberries, you will realise that they taste awful even if the bushes haven't been used as a toilet. They are disgusting. They look like nasty spiny sea creatures, but don't taste as nice as nasty spiny sea creatures. I was also going to say that the two idiots had been using nettles instead of toilet paper, but the very thought of it made my eyes water so much that I couldn't even type the right words.
20
Every evil spy is plagued with nightmares of doing their last transformation and losing their final bit of magic. It would mean that whatever form they were in when the very last transformation happened would be how they looked for the rest of their lives. As her magic faded, the Hearse Whisperer had these bad dreams almost every day and each one was worse than the one before. In the latest one she was a junior prune taster in the court of Henry VIII, not even the chief prune taster. The trick was to retire to the Street of a Thousand Chiropodists before you reached the very last transformation. The Hearse Whisperer did not want to end up like her great-grandmother, who was now a large black slug living on a cabbage in the kitchen garden of a deserted Belgian monastery. No, if she timed it right, she could spent the rest of her life working at the House of Corns. Though when she thought about it, maybe being a cabbage in a deserted monastery was not such a bad option.
21
Like Belgium was.
22
On a small island like Tristan da Cunha rats are unwelcome visitors, so once a year they have a Ratting Day when they try to catch as many as they can. There are prizes, including one for the longest rat tail!
23
The second one is at Quicklime College in Patagonia. The third one is top secret and actually never stays in the same place for more than a few minutes. Winchflat Flood, of course, has built a Time-Warp-Gate-Detector so he is the only person who always knows where it is. See
The Floods 8: Better Homes and Gardens
â which, strangely, I haven't even written yet!
24
This is absolutely true. Look at it here: http://www.tristandc.com/peak.php
25
I know, as you should by now, that every single part of Transylvania Waters is remote, but this valley is the most remote bit of the whole country. Very few people who actually live in Transylvania Waters have heard of it and even one really stupid goatherd who lives in the actual valley hasn't heard of it.
26
Yes, I know half of thirty-seven is eighteen and a half, but if you ever meet the strange half person, you'll understand.
27
Oops, seem to have got muddled up with my shopping list.
28
And painful agony was one of the Hearse Whisperer's favourite things, something she had enjoyed many, many times and considered herself to be something of a connoisseur of.
29
For the exact recipe of the blood that Dr Reversion poured into the Hearse Whisperer's veins,
see the back of this book.
30
The Queen's teeth had been gritted since she had been dropped on the beach while on holiday recently with her family. See
The Floods 6: The Great Outdoors
.
31
The Hearse Whisperer had been right in thinking that she had almost no transformations left. Dr Reversion had known this and that was the reason she had sent her back to Tristan da Cunha in her real form. She would have to change to leave there and that would weaken her even more.
32
See next chapter.
33
Actually it hadn't, because there hadn't been a city there at the dawn of time and the fog had only been acid brown since the Industrial Revolution. Before that, it had been a happy fog full of songbirds and butterflies.
34
Of course it's on all sides â otherwise it wouldn't be surrounded.
35
This is why Transylvania Waters long ago gave up with cemeteries. You'd bury your dead granny and by the next day the Night Vultures had dug her up and eaten her. Most homes now have a huge dinner plate on the roof, which saves both the inhabitants and the vultures a lot of digging. The birds are known locally as the Funeral Directors.
36
Apart from the first Thursday of each month when they get together and play bingo.
37
Including me and everyone at my publisher.
38
A few years later the Queen did write the book
Dead Kings Don't Wear Crowns
and it was the bestselling title in the whole of Transylvania Waters' publishing history, outselling the other three books published there by ten to one.
