Neighbours (7 page)

Sergeant LeDouche had never been to the Floods' house, nor had he ever wanted to. The place gave him the creeps, but after Mrs Dent's call about the shoes, he had no choice. If there was actual evidence of foul play, then Dickie and Tracylene's disappearances could no longer be ignored and would have to be looked into. He would have to rub out their entries in the CLASS book and rewrite them in the proper missing persons book, the one that meant he had to do something, like investigating or covering everything up – whichever was the easiest.

He parked his police car down the street outside number 21 and walked back to the Floods' gate. It opened a split second before he touched it and closed
as soon as he was through. He turned to open it again but it growled at him.

‘Come in, Forty-Two,' he said into his walkie-talkie. ‘Forty-Two' was his nickname for his sidekick, who was waiting in the car. (His real name was Forty-One – Peter Lawrence Henry Forty-One, to be precise.)

‘Hello, Sarge,' said Forty-Two.

‘The front gate just growled at me, Forty-Two,' said the sergeant.

‘Of course it did, Sarge.'

The sergeant could have sworn he heard the gate laughing, but he decided not to tell Forty-Two about that. He walked up the path to the front door and, a split second before his finger reached it, the bell rang. The door opened and something small, dark and very hairy stood there wagging its back end. It was Satanella.

‘What do you want?' asked Satanella.

‘Err, um,' said the sergeant, looking down the hall to see who was talking to him.

‘Down here,' said Satanella. ‘I may look like a dog, but that doesn't mean I am one. What do you want?'

‘Right, yes, okay … Is your, er, master or mistress in?' LeDouche asked her, not believing he was actually talking to a dog. He just hoped no one could see him.

‘Wait there,' said Satanella and scampered off down the hall.

‘Forty-Two, you still there?'

‘Yes, Sarge.'

‘A dog just spoke to me. It actually said proper words and –'

‘Well, well, that's nice,' said Forty-Two into the car radio while he reached for his mobile phone. He wondered how long it would take for an ambulance and a doctor with a powerful sedative and a straightjacket to arrive.

‘Good afternoon,' said Mordonna, appearing from nowhere. ‘What can we do for you?'

Sergeant LeDouche was captivated. Mordonna had deliberately left her sunglasses off and it's a well-known fact that anyone who looks into her eyes falls hopelessly head over heels in love with her. Nerlin did it several times a day.

‘I um, er, um,' the sergeant stammered, and followed Mordonna into the kitchen like a devoted puppy.

‘Sit down and tell me what the problem is,' said Mordonna.

‘Well, my wife doesn't understand me, my Vicki's doing badly at school and I've started to go bald,' the sergeant began.
¹⁹

‘No, no. I mean, why are you here?'

‘Oh, that is so true.
Why
am I here?' said the sergeant. ‘Why is any of us here? What does it all
mean
?'

‘No, why have you come to my house?' said Mordonna.

‘Shoes,' the sergeant replied. ‘Red shoes.'

‘These shoes?' said Mordonna, holding up the high heels.

‘Tracylene's shoes.'

‘Yes, that nasty little girl.' Mordonna's eyes narrowed as she spoke. She put her sunglasses on and released the policeman from her enchanting powers.

‘My mother enjoyed her very much,' she added.

‘Your mother?' said LeDouche.

‘Yes, my mother. She's buried in the back garden. Do you want to meet her?'

‘Meet her? Buried … she's
dead
?'

‘Of course she's dead,' said Mordonna. ‘You don't bury people when they're alive, do you?'
²⁰

‘Yeah but, no but – excuse me a minute. I have to talk to my partner.' Switching on his walkie-talkie, the sergeant hurried out into the hall.

‘Forty-Two, are you there?'

‘Er, yes,' Forty-Two replied cautiously. The ambulance was still ten minutes away so he had to play for time.

‘I need a team of officers with shovels,' LeDouche told him.

‘Of course you do,' said Forty-Two slowly.

‘I think the girl's buried in the back garden and I believe they might have buried an old lady there too, while she was still alive,' said the sergeant.

‘Okay. Excellent. Well done, Sarge,' said Forty-Two. ‘There aren't any more talking animals or gates, are there?'

‘No, no. Just phone for back-up, like I told you,' LeDouche ordered.

‘No worries, Sarge. I've done that already. They should be here in a few minutes. You just play for time.'

‘Okay, that's sorted out then,' said the sergeant, walking back into the Floods' kitchen. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?'

‘Tea? Tea? I don't think we've got any tea,' Mordonna replied. ‘Got a nice drop of chilled bat's blood.'

‘No, that's fine. I'll just have a glass of water.'

‘Okay. Have a nice glass of chilled water from
our lovely new fridge,' said Mordonna. ‘Would you like a frog's eye in it?'

‘No, it's all right. I'm not actually that thirsty,' said the sergeant. ‘Maybe we could have a look in the back garden.'

‘Yes, of course. I was telling Mother about you while you were on the phone just then. Follow me.'

They walked outside and there, as Mordonna had said, was a grave, right in the middle of the lawn next to the clothesline.

‘This is the policeman I was telling you about, Mother,' Mordonna shouted down at the grave. There was silence for a moment. ‘Oh, all right, Mother.'

Turning back to LeDouche, she added, ‘Sorry I had to shout. Mother's a bit deaf. She wants to shake your hand.'

‘Of course she does,' said the sergeant and walked over to the grave side.

The ground opened and a skinny skeleton arm appeared.

‘Mother says just shake her hand. She only lets wizards kiss it.'

The sergeant fainted.

When Forty-Two, three large ambulance men and a doctor arrived five minutes later, Sergeant LeDouche was lying on the couch in the Floods' lounge room. He was mumbling to himself and dribbling into his walkie-talkie.

‘I'm terribly sorry about all this, madam,' said the doctor. ‘It's the strain of the job.'

‘I understand,' said Mordonna from behind her dark glasses.

Satanella made pretend happy little yappy dog noises as one of the ambulance men tickled her
tummy. The doctor gave the sergeant a powerful sedative and then they took him away to the mad house in a straightjacket. His wife and children decided they'd be happier with Forty-Two, who had just been promoted and didn't look like the sort of man who would have other girlfriends.

Sergeant LeDouche spent a very long time resting and being given large doses of strange medicine and electric shock treatment at the Sunshine Home for the Really Stressed before getting a pension and going off to live all alone by the sea in a small damp flat with no waterfront views. Now and then over the following years, there were nights when he would wake up screaming, because he knew what he had heard and seen had not been in his imagination. And he knew without a doubt that the Floods had killed Tracylene, and probably Dickie, and that
they had cut off his brilliant career long before it had reached its peak.

Thoughts of revenge grew dark and evil in his heart. Somehow, somewhere, he would pay them back.

A couple of months after the sergeant had been taken away, Mrs Dent went into Tracylene's old bedroom and remembered that she'd once had a daughter. Mr Dent had already filled Dickie's old room with bits of old motorbike, some buckets of grease and twelve hundred and twenty-seven empty beer cans. But apart from taking Tracylene's budgie, Adolf, down to the kitchen – where he got fatter and fatter and fatter on a diet of pizza crusts and kept telling Mr Dent he needed more lipstick – neither parent had been in her room since.

I wonder what happened to Tracylene
, Mrs Dent thought, and then she remembered the red shoes.

She rang the police station, but since the sergeant had been taken away they had decided on a new policy and that was to pretend the Dents did not exist. The whole family had just been in the sick sergeant's imagination.

‘I'm sorry, madam,' they said to Mrs Dent. ‘The case is closed.'

‘But my daughter,' said Mrs Dent. ‘She's missing.'

‘Congratulations,' said the policeman and put the phone down.

Mrs Dent wasn't that bothered – she was more interested in finding out if there was a fattest budgie in the world category in the
Guinness World Records
TV show – but that night when most of the world was asleep, she forced herself through the hole in the fence into the Floods' back garden.

It was as quiet as the grave, which wasn't really surprising considering how many people were buried there. Incredibly, the red shoes were still there. Mrs Dent took off her slippers and put them on. She would have thought about the story of Cinderella,
except ‘Cinderella' was much too big a word to fit inside her head.

Upstairs in one of the back bedrooms, Winchflat, the family's computer genius, was doing what he did most nights: following strange people around the world on the internet. As midnight fell in one chat room, he moved on to the next time zone. On the net Winchflat was a legend. He could hack into anything and had once made the whole of America bankrupt in a single night, just for the fun of it. He put all the money back the next day, but not before three hundred and four crooked accountants and bank managers had committed suicide – a bonus even he hadn't imagined. He made all the poor people a bit richer and all the rich people quite a bit poorer. Of course it was all hushed up, but all the super-hackers knew Winchflat (or Naughty Trixie, as he was known on the net) had been there.

The night Mrs Dent came into their back garden, Winchflat was standing by the window drinking a can of Super-High-Caffeine-Zap-A-Cola when he looked down and saw her stumbling about
on the lawn in the red high heels they had left there as bait. He immediately went and told the others.

‘The hippo has landed.'

‘Okay,' said Nerlin, ‘but we still have to decide what to do with her.'

‘Mummy's hungry,' said Mordonna.

‘No, that's boring,' said Morbid. Silent nodded vigorously.

‘We want something we can all enjoy,' said Satanella. ‘Anyway, all that fat wouldn't be good to eat, even for someone as dead as Granny.'

‘Something artistic,' Betty suggested. She was
the creative one in the family. ‘Maybe we could turn her into a fruit tree, or a hot tub.'

‘Can you imagine what the fruit would taste like?' said Valla. ‘Yuck. Quite like the hot tub idea, though. I mean, she's a great big tub already.'

‘No, no, I've got it,' said Nerlin. ‘What did the wretched woman do that annoyed us the most?'

‘Breathe?' said Winchflat.

‘No,
keep her TV blaring out all day and night
. So let's turn her into a super deluxe flat-screen plasma television.'

‘Can we have surround sound with all the loudspeakers around the room?'

‘Absolutely,' said Nerlin.

‘Can
we
do it?' asked the twins.

‘No, me, me!' said Merlinmary.

‘We'll draw straws,' Nerlin decided. ‘Everyone get a pencil and paper, and whoever draws the longest straw can do the magic.'

(You might be wondering why Nerlin didn't just do the magic himself. Well, I'm going to let you in on a very secret secret that no one who isn't a wizard or witch
knows. It will also explain why Nerlin took Merlinmary with him when he went to talk to Mr Dent, and why it was Merlinmary who turned Rambo into a poodle. Before I do, you must promise inside your head that you will never tell this secret to anyone else.

If you look at all the stories about wizards from Merlin through to Harry Potter, you will see that not many of them get married and have children. You might think this is because most wizards are seriously ugly, but that's not the case. Most witches actually think wizards look really cool and handsome. No, the reason is this: when a wizard is born he has magical powers, but if he has a child, that child takes some of his parent's magical powers. And as the child grows so do his magical powers, but the bit his father gave him is not replaced. This means that Nerlin, who has had seven children, has lost a lot of his magic.

It doesn't matter how the children are made – in a laboratory, grown from a cutting or made like you and I were – the wizard always loses a bit of his power.

Now the only thing that Nerlin can turn people into is a potted plant. He has even lost the power to
make them become frogs or toads.

When people call him Merlin, which they do all the time, he explains that ‘N' comes after ‘M' and he came after Merlin so that was why he was called Nerlin. Sensible people look confused at this, and just nod. Stupid people look sarcastic and ask him why his sons aren't called Oerlin, Perlin and Qerlin, then. These people usually get turned into geraniums.

‘Couldn't you try to turn them into useful herbs, like parsley and mint and deadly nightshade?' Mordonna would ask. ‘I hate geraniums, with all their horrible bright happy flowers.'

The Floods are a very close, loving family so they make sure that no outsiders ever discover Nerlin's secret. They're not likely to anyway. Nerlin is very tall, wears a big black cloak and looks seriously evil. Only complete idiots ever say, ‘You haven't got any magical powers' – and they're better off as potted plants anyway.

Nerlin's loss of powers do make him quite depressed, though. ‘I've lost my magic,' he says to Mordonna when they're alone. ‘How can you love a man with no magic?'

‘You'll always be magic to me, my darling,' Mordonna reassures him. ‘Have you thought of potted chrysanthemums? They're much nicer than geraniums, and they're the flower of death too.'

‘I don't choose geraniums deliberately, my angel,' Nerlin explains. ‘I try to make other plants but they always turn out geraniums. I hate geraniums.'

The obvious solution would have been for Mordonna to turn them into other plants herself. She could have done it easily, but she never did. It would have made Nerlin even more depressed.)

Betty drew the longest and most artistic-looking straw, so she got to do the trick. She opened the back door.

‘Hello, Mrs Hippo,' she said.

Mrs Dent tripped over her heels and fell flat on her face. Queen Scratchrot's arms poked out of her grave and started waving around.

‘DROP IT!' shouted Betty before her granny could get a grip. ‘Are you looking for something, Mrs Hippo?'

‘You killed my Tracylene, didn't you?' said
Mrs Dent, struggling to her feet. She started to limp towards the house. One of the high heels had broken off so she walked with a ridiculous limp that made the whole family burst out laughing. ‘I'll get youse!'

‘Yes, you will,' said Betty. ‘You'll get us lots of
lovely wildlife documentaries and fancy films with subtitles.'

‘And
World's Funniest Funerals
,' said Morbid.

‘And
Animal Hospital
,' said Satanella.

‘And great cookery programmes, too,' said Mordonna.

‘And
no
reality shows at all,' said Winchflat.

Mordonna put her arm around Betty and said, ‘Look, darling, I know you drew the best straw, but maybe you better let someone else do the magic. You know how your tricks sometimes don't work out quite how you plan them, and we don't want her turned into a cabin cruiser or a hot-air balloon.'

‘She's one of them already, Mummy,' said Betty, and they all laughed again, which made Mrs Dent even redder in the face.

‘Better make sure there's a control to turn the colour down,' Valla added and then everyone laughed so much their sides began to ache.

They waited until Mrs Dent reached the house. Big flat-screen TVs are quite heavy and they wanted their victim to be as close as possible, so they wouldn't
have to carry her too far. Mrs Dent hobbled across the verandah and lunged for the door. As she tripped and fell inside, Winchflat clicked his fingers. There was a quick flash and a split second later she turned into a television – and not a plasma one, but an LCD, which has a much better picture.

‘Brilliant,' said the twins.

‘And viewable from a very wide angle,' said Nerlin.

‘She'd need to be,' Betty laughed.

‘Stop it, stop it,' cried Mordonna. ‘If I laugh any more I'll wet myself.'

‘Yeewwww, Mum, too much information,' said Morbid.

‘The sound from the bass speakers is making my fur stand on end,' said Satanella.

The whole family sat up for the rest of the night watching really old horror movies and the shopping channel, which is all that's on at that time of day. Winchflat said he'd work on it so they'd be able to get every single channel in every single country on Earth – which would mean they could watch really old
horror movies and shopping channels in hundreds of different languages.
²¹

‘Three down, one to go,' said Mordonna, cuddling up to Nerlin. ‘This couch is a bit lumpy. You know, I think it's time we got a new one.'

‘As you said, one to go.'