Mort (3 page)

It took Trish Molyneux longer than she'd thought to climb the steps. After a couple of minutes, the rain had slackened only for them to be engulfed by thick fog, hardly able to see a few steps below and a few steps above.

It was exactly like Jurassic Park, thought Nigel. He fully expected the sharp beak of a pterodactyl to loom out of the mist in front of them at any moment.

However, after almost twenty more minutes of slipping and sliding, they reached
the top of the cliffs and stood, panting in the cold Unk air, without having seen anything that resembled a pterodactyl.

‘At least the rain's stopped,' said Trish. ‘Not far now, eh?'

Nigel looked around them. He couldn't see a thing. How did Trish know it wasn't far? He was just about to open his mouth to ask exactly that when the mist parted and, in the far distance, they glimpsed the jagged outline of Festering Hall perched high on a gigantic granite outcrop. Then, as quickly as it had lifted, the mist rolled back in, but not before Nigel had glimpsed what looked alarmingly like a swamp, complete with decaying trees draped in moss.

‘How on earth are we going to find that place now?' said Nigel, waving a hand in the general direction of Festering. ‘And what about that swamp? Did you see it? It looked like something out of a horror movie!'

‘Swamp?' said Trish. ‘There aren't any
swamps round here, Nigel. What you saw was a marsh, which has, I believe, a path running through it. To the north.' She opened her briefcase and took out a sheaf of printouts, each neatly encased in a plastic sheet. ‘And we'll find it easily. I google-mapped everything before I came, just in case we didn't have reception for the GPS.' She waved her smartphone in the air, looked at it and frowned. ‘Which we don't.'

‘But we don't know which way is north. We don't have a compa–' Nigel tailed off. Trish had produced a shiny brass-plated compass from her briefcase. It looked like the sort of thing Scott of the Antarctic would have used.

‘We'll do it the old-fashioned way, Nigel. It'll be fun!'

Fun? Nigel had a funny feeling that very little on Unk Island was going to fall under the general heading of ‘fun'. He shrugged and followed his boss into the mist, her eyes
fixed on the compass in her hand. For all he knew, Trish might have a helicopter tucked away in her briefcase. She seemed to have thought of everything else.

Ten minutes later they were in the swamp.

Up close it was ten times scarier than it had looked from a distance and it was, despite what Trish said, definitely a swamp. Stinking black and green mud bubbled up against the narrow pathway and Nigel could have sworn he'd seen shapes moving through the broken-down trees and decaying vegetation.

‘I really think we should go back, Trish,' he said to Trish's back as she strode into the swamp, the trees closing in above their heads. ‘Let head office deal with it.'

‘As far as this mission is concerned, we are head office, Nigel,' said Trish, speaking over her shoulder as she entered a small clearing where the path widened a little. ‘And it's our job to be here, Nigel. Our job. What would we say to Mr Skelly if we abandoned our
mission now? He'd be dreadfully disappointed in us.'

There was no reply.

‘Nigel?' said Trish as she turned around.

Nigel had vanished.

Normally, animals caught in one of Genghis Khan's hoist traps made a lot of noise, perhaps sensing they were about to be served up like some Mongolian equivalent of a sausage sandwich.

This wasn't the case with Nigel because he had cracked his head so sharply against a branch on his journey upwards that he had been knocked out cold, and was now tied up as tight as a Christmas turkey dangling in a butcher's window.

Khan balanced on a branch midway up a
decaying elm and looked down at the woman in the small clearing below, searching for her missing companion.

He scratched an itch inside the steel collar around his neck.

If it hadn't been for the damn thing, he'd have thrown this woman and her stupid servant off the cliffs and made up some story for Mort about them falling off accidentally. But Khan knew from bitter experience that Mortimer DeVere was no pushover. ‘No killing' he'd said, and Khan intended to obey. Mort had a way of sniffing out fibs like a terrier sniffing out rats, and an electric jolt from the collar was not something even the pain-hardened Khan wanted to repeat.

So Khan's plan, such as it was, was a three-stage idea.

Stage one was to simply scare the visitors, shake them up a bit. This part, Khan had already completed.

Stage two was to scare them some more.
This, Khan was about to do.

Stage three involved the visitors running fast back to the jetty and getting the ferry home. With a bit of luck Khan hoped he'd be home for the semifinal of
American Idol
.

Khan pulled out a sword from his belt and prodded Nigel's limp body with the toe of his boot. Time for Stage two.

Nigel's eyes opened. A split second later, with Khan's blade waving in front of his face, so did his mouth.

Trish Molyneux was only four metres below but, had she been four hundred metres away, stone deaf, with cotton wool stuffed in her ears and her head in a bucket of water, there would have been no chance of her not hearing Nigel's scream.

This close, it almost made her ears bleed.

Khan nodded happily. With Nigel making a noise like that, Khan knew any sane woman would be halfway to the ferry in no time.

‘Nigel?' Trish said, peering up through the
branches towards where Khan was sitting. ‘Are you all right?'

Khan blinked. Instead of turning tail and running back to the ferry, Trish kicked off her shoes and began to climb the tree. It was rough going, but the woman moved quicker than Khan would have believed possible, and in no time at all was high enough to see Khan clearly, one hand clamped firmly around Nigel's mouth, the other clasping a fearsome-looking sword.

‘Oh,' said Trish. Whatever she'd expected to find up in the tree, it wasn't a Mongolian warlord from the thirteenth century.

Trish and Khan looked at one another.

Then Khan opened his mouth and roared, a gale-force howl of complete animal anger, which had reduced battle-hardened generals to tears before now.

Apart from wrinkling her nose, Trish didn't seem to have noticed.

Khan roared again and waved his sword in
Trish's face as she rummaged around in her handbag.

As he opened his mouth to shout at the woman again, Khan realised something was wrong. His chin felt warm and he could smell smoke.

He looked down and saw that (a) the woman was holding a lit match and (b) his beard was on fire.

‘Goodbye,' said Trish and, bracing herself against the trunk of the tree, kicked Khan hard between his legs.

Once, many years ago, the original Genghis Khan had woken to find a blood-soaked Persian warrior holding an axe to his throat only seconds away from separating his head from his body. Until this moment in the tree, he had thought that would be the most surprising moment of his life.

He was wrong.

Khan's eyes opened wide and, with a high-pitched squeaking sound like a tyre losing air, he toppled slowly backwards out of the tree, his beard trailing smoke behind him. Trish smoothly lifted his sword from his limp fingers as he fell.

The Mongolian hit the ground with a thunderous crash and bounced into a pool of thick grey–green mud, steam rising from his flaming beard as he sank below the surface.

‘What a rude man,' said Trish. Nigel
just nodded. His mouth didn't appear to be working.

Trish took Khan's sword and sliced through the rope holding Nigel. Landing with a bump and scrambling free, he sprinted towards a thick tangle of greenery.

‘Nigel!' yelled Trish. ‘Wait!'

By the time she'd climbed down from the tree, Nigel had disappeared for the second time that morning.

Trish checked her watch.

Four hours until the ferry came back.

She checked her compass and headed briskly in the direction taken by the panicking Nigel.

Behind Trish's retreating back, Khan's face rose slowly from the stinking mud. Smoke coiling around his scorched beard, he removed an eel from his ear and stared hatefully after Trish.

No matter what that pipsqueak Mortimer DeVere told him to do, Khan swore by the
blood-drenched bones of all the mighty ancestor warriors of the Mongolian Empire and by the Ten Terrible Tribes of Borjigin, that that devil woman and her cry-baby servant would never leave Unk Island.

‘She did what?'

Mort looked away from the computer screen where he'd been rechecking the timing of the eclipse and stared at his sister. What Agnetha had just told him was so shocking he had clean forgotten about his annoyance at her coming into his bedroom without knocking.

‘She kicked your little pet right into the swamp,' said Agnetha, smiling sweetly. ‘After setting his disgusting beard on fire. I saw it all, I was right there hiding in the
bushes the whole time.'

Mort blinked. This was impossible.

‘Tell me again what happened, Aggers. In detail. This is important.'

Agnetha sat down on the edge of Mort's bed and went through the story again, without letting slip she knew about the secret laboratory. You never knew when that information might come in useful.

As his sister spoke, Mort's face remained stern, but deep inside he felt a wonderful little electric thrill.

The woman had defeated Khan!

An opponent who could do that was a worthy enemy indeed.

Still, thought Mort with a glance at Agnetha's smug face, he could do without his sister's obvious glee at Khan's defeat.

‘You do know why they're here, Aggers?' Mort asked. He plucked the letter from his pocket and handed it to Agnetha.

She unfolded the sheet.

Agnetha looked up from the letter. ‘They want us to go to school?'

‘Bingo,' said Mort.

Agnetha sucked her lower lip. ‘I've already been to school. Lots of times. I don't want to go to school again.'

‘Exactly,' said Mort. ‘The cheek!'

Mort looked at Agnetha. ‘We have obviously underestimated this Ms Molyneux. She's got to be stopped at all costs!'

‘What's this “we” stuff, Mort? Khan is yours. I didn't have anything to do with your stupid plan. And what's this “at all costs” stuff? It's only school! I'm sure we can wriggle our way out of anything she throws at us.'

Mort paused.

The annoying thing about Agnetha was that she had spotted the flaw in his argument. They probably could find a way to get out of the school thing – although after hearing how easily this Trish woman had dealt with Khan, Mort wasn't quite as sure as Agnetha about that. But Mort couldn't mention the real reason he didn't want Trish Molyneux anywhere near Festering Hall today of all days.

‘Or is there something you're not telling me?' asked Agnetha. There was a funny
expression on her face that Mort didn't like the look of.

‘No,' he replied, a little too quickly. ‘No reason. I just hate school. Remember Sparta?'

Agnetha shivered. Of course she remembered. Sometime around 510 BC, their parents had had a stupid idea about toughening them up a little and had sent them to a school on the banks of the Evrotas. It had nearly killed them both.

‘Okay,' said Agnetha, ‘but Unk Shire isn't Sparta!'

‘We can't take that chance,' replied Mort, avoiding Agnetha's eye. ‘I'll sort it out. Scare her off.'

‘Like Khan?'

Mort ignored Agnetha and leaned back in his leather chair, folded his arms and frowned.

Sending Khan out had clearly been a tactical error.

He could see now he had been too confident in the ability of the Mongolian to
scare off the visitors. Now it looked as though he was going to have to knuckle down and get serious with this Trish woman.

What he needed was something really scary. Something even the conqueror of Khan couldn't deal with.

‘Mort,' said Agnetha, ‘I don't like the look on your face. You look exactly like you did that time you put a shark in Tutankhamun's bathtub.'

‘He deserved it, the little sneak!' Mort got to his feet and began pacing back and forth. ‘It's time to bring out the big guns,' said Mort, his eyes glittering. Agnetha felt a chill run down her spine. There was a dangerous streak in her brother that had landed both of them in hot water before now. And each time it had started with the same expression on his face he wore now. ‘I've been too soft. Much too soft.'

As if in answer, from somewhere deep in the belly of Festering Hall came a rumbling
howl. Agnetha glanced sharply at her brother and grabbed his sleeve.

‘You don't mean …? No, Mort, you can't! Not Smiler!'

‘Just watch me! I'm going to scare these
interfering busybodies so much they'll swim back to the mainland!'

‘If they make it to the water!' Agnetha grabbed Mort's arm. He shrugged himself free from her grasp and sprinted for the door.

‘Wait! Mort!'

Mort was already heading down the stairs two at a time.

‘Don't worry, Aggers!' he shouted over his shoulder. ‘You'll thank me for this later!'

Agnetha took a step forward but she was too late.

Mort was gone.