Pure Dead Magic (4 page)

His eyes roamed around his cell, taking in his floor-level view of four stone walls, one slatted bench, one solid door with peephole and lock, rather too many ceiling-mounted lightbulbs searing his eyes, and what looked ominously like a potty within olfactory range of where he lay.

Things were not looking good, he decided, slowly getting onto all fours and then gently easing his stiff limbs onto the slatted bench. It
was
a potty.

This is a prison cell. This thing throbbing and pounding on the end of your neck is a head. Use it, Luciano. Think back, he
commanded himself, what was the last thing you remember?

He’d been in a huff for some reason, stomping along the little lane that connected StregaSchloss with the main road to Auchenlochtermuchty. It was raining, he recalled, which was why …

He was momentarily distracted by the sight of a cockroach climbing out of the potty and pausing on the rim for a spot of grooming. To his disgust, it appeared to be smacking its tiny lips.

 … which was why he’d been only too glad to accept a lift from the driver of the black Mercedes who’d stopped to ask for directions. The car’s windows were made out of dark-tinted glass, so he’d been unaware …

The cockroach keeled over and, with an almost inaudible splash, fell backward into the potty.

 … that sitting in the back of the car was a man dressed in black, gun lying casually in his lap, beckoning him inward with a full hypodermic syringe, which was promptly emptied into his arm …

 … which would explain the pounding headache and brain-fuzz that made his recall of events so much more difficult. So that was how, but where was he now? And why? And who?
Who
had kidnapped him? He had the sneaking suspicion that whoever it was did not have his best interests at heart.

This opinion was further reinforced by a ghastly scream from somewhere outside Signor Strega-Borgia’s cell door. “NO, NO, NO, scusi, Don Borgia, I so sorry I overcook da pasta, I never never do eet again. On my mama’s grave, I swear I never turn eet into stewed knitting ever again, NOOOOOOOO. AAAARGHHHHHH. Not the sharks! NOOOO!”

And, disturbingly, another voice, a vaguely familiar voice,
“Act like a man, Ragu. Pull yourself together, it’s not the sharks, stupido, it’s the piranhas, haa-haa haaa.”

Signor Strega-Borgia turned pale and began to shake.
Don Borgia? Don Lucifer di S’Embowelli Borgia?
The most evil, heartless, amoral being ever to walk the earth? The man whose idea of a noble deed was to help little old ladies cross the street into the path of oncoming traffic? Whose idea of entertainment was rounding up stray cats and cooking them in a microwave? Whose childhood had been spent in torturing his half brother—his half brother Luciano Strega-Borgia—who was currently sobbing his eyes out on a gray prison-cell floor and begging a drowned cockroach to exchange lives with him?

Yes.
That
Don Lucifer di S’Embowelli Borgia, and none other.

E-rats

L
ife goes on, as it always has. Worlds collapse, people go to war, divorce, and cause each other immense amounts of grief, but diapers still have to be changed, food cooked, and parents, no matter how unhappy, still have to go to work.

Thus it was at StregaSchloss. Mrs. McLachlan settled in, Damp fell in love with her, and Titus and Pandora had to admit grudgingly that her fries were indeed crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle.

Signora Strega-Borgia bid the children a tearful farewell and set off to complete her degree in Advanced Witchcraft, returning to StregaSchloss on weekends.

In the absence of her mother, Pandora opened Multitudina’s cage door and allowed her pet rat the freedom of StregaSchloss. By default, this freedom was also granted to Multitudina’s thirteen offspring.

Seizing the opportunity to unlock the secrets of his absent
father’s vast computer, Titus moved the entire system out of Signor Strega-Borgia’s study and into his own bedroom.

With these two seemingly unconnected actions, Titus and Pandora unwittingly set off a chain reaction of events that would prove to be catastrophic. This is how it began.

Damp had done A Bad Thing. Damp knew it was A Bad Thing because Mrs. McLachlan’s mouth had shrunk to a flat tight line, and her eyes had grown cold and wee.

Minutes before, Damp had been gazing in adoration at the open disk drawer on Titus’s CD-ROM. Above the disk drawer sat Titus’s modem with its two buttons decorated with stick-on eyeballs. Titus had applied these from a sheet of cutout face parts, and thus it was hardly surprising that Damp put two and two together and arrived at pi r squared.

It’s a
face,
thought Damp delightedly, what a
big
mouth—all the better to eat breakfast with. She crawled closer to the CD-ROM.

Hello, face, she thought, waving some bacon rinds that she’d found on the floor. Want some breakfast? She clambered onto Titus’s desk, using its open drawers as steps, waving the bacon rinds like a flag. The open CD drawer gaped hungrily. Nice face, decided Damp, have some breakfast. With small baby fingers, Damp stuffed her bacon rinds, one by one, into Titus’s CD-ROM.

It was thus that Mrs. McLachlan found her. “Damp! NO! Stop right NOW!” she commanded.

Uh-oh, thought Damp. She paused in her bacon-stuffing efforts and, at a loss for what to do next, popped her thumb into her mouth and simultaneously risked a quick glance at her
beloved nanny. What she saw was not cheering. Instead of radiating Highland warmth and pillowy comfort, Mrs. McLachlan’s whole being smacked of cold rain showers and grim mountain peaks.

Mrs. McLachlan bristled, pursed, and tsked. “Right, girly,” she said, plucking Damp off Titus’s desk, “you’re coming where I can keep an eye on you, but first, a diaper change.”

Sorry, face, thought Damp as she was hauled inelegantly bathroomward. Bye-bye, face.

The enticing reek of bacon rinds slowly congealing inside the CD-ROM turned it into an olfactory beacon, sending out a clear signal to those creatures that relied on their noses for survival. Several such creatures, thirteen to be exact, were idly chewing paper under Titus’s bed when the first finger-like waft of bacon arrived. Thirteen noses twitched. The fourteenth nose snored, attached to Multitudina, rat mother to multitudes, who was catching up on some well-earned sleep while her brood amused themselves with an irreplaceable stack of prewar
National Geographic
magazines. Thirteen noses found bacon to be a far more exciting prospect, foodwise, than paper and ink. Fifty-two pink paws stampeded for the enticements of the CD-ROM, squeaking and snapping at each other in their haste to be first at the feast.

Multitudina awoke to see the last of her children’s bald tails snaking to and fro, dangling twitchily from the open drawer of the CD-ROM.

“RATS!” she squeaked, lunging after her offspring and gaining the desktop as the last millimeter of tail vanished into the gray gape of the drawer. Despite a rigorous postnatal exercise program, Multitudina had not managed to regain her skinny
pre-pregnancy figure, and found herself unable to squeeze through the gap and rescue her children. Wild squeakings from within informed her that her children were quite happy, thank you very much, and didn’t intend ever coming back out to eat paper with Mum. Having scoured the CD-ROM for bacon rinds and congealed fat, they’d found a way into another gray slot and were checking it out for more of the same. The thirteen squeakings grew fainter as Multitudina’s brood investigated Titus’s adjoining modem.

Multitudina squatted on the keyboard to have a think about what to do next, depressing several keys under her bottom as she considered the problem. Behind her, the screen sprang to life. A dialogue box appeared, saying SEND? Multitudina scratched an itch on her hindquarters, and unknown to her, depressed several keys simultaneously. MESSAGE SENT flashed briefly.

Abruptly the squeaking stopped. Multitudina stopped scratching and sniffed the air. The babies were gone. Here one minute and gone the next. What was a mother to do? She heaved a sigh of relief. Peace at last, she thought, and plenty more where they came from. She leapt off the desk, scuttled under the bed, and began chewing up the May 1935 edition in preparation for her next brood.

The Wager

“T
itus, I’m in deep poo.” Pandora collapsed on her brother’s bed with a small wail.

Titus didn’t respond, unless a grunt counted as an expression of brotherly concern.

“Listen up, Titus, I need your help.”

“I’m busy,” came the reply.

Pandora unfolded herself from the bed and came to stand by her brother. Titus muttered and tapped on a keyboard, seemingly oblivious to the presence of his sister.

“I can’t tell where that stupid computer ends and you begin. Titus, if you don’t stop and listen to me, I’m going to see if
it
likes Coke as much as you do.”

Titus unglued his eyeballs from the screen and looked up. Pandora was unscrewing the cap from a vast bottle of brown fizz. He sighed.

“Ah! Eyeball contact,” gloated Pandora. “Is there intelligent
life on Planet Titus? Yes, there appears to be a large amoeba thing with an open hole in the middle of its head, but we are experiencing some difficulty in establishing communication.”

Titus sighed again. “What
is
it?” he said.

“I’ve lost Multitudina.”

“Big deal,” said Titus, “plenty more rats where she came from.”

Pandora glared at her brother. “And all her babies, Titus—all thirteen of them.”

“They’ll turn up,” said Titus philosophically. “Floating in the soup, down the toilet, hot-wired to the back of the fridge …”

“Titus. I shut them in
here.
Before breakfast. And when I came back upstairs with their bacon rinds, they were gone.”

“What did you do with the bacon rinds?” asked Titus irrelevantly.

“Damp probably ate them. But that’s not the point, the point is—”

“The point is,” said Titus, “that this is
my
bedroom, and
you
introduced fourteen free-range rats, several bits of dead pig, and one incontinent baby into
my
space. Without
my
permission.
That’s
the point.”

“Your Highness. Accept my humble apologies. Entering your Royal Bedchamber without permission is a crime punishable by death, but, sire, I can account for said bits of bacon and smelly baby—one is inside the other, and both are in the nursery—but where are Multitudina and her tribe?”

“You’re toast, Pandora,” said Titus. “Mum’ll be back tonight and when she finds out …”

“Titus…,” groaned Pandora.
“Please …”

“I don’t like rats, remember? Frankly, I’m delighted that your disgusting rodent’s done a runner.”

“She’s
not
disgusting.”

“She’s a foul-mouthed, yellow-fanged, smelly bit of vermin that’s probably into cannibalism.”

“She did
not
eat her babies, Titus. You’ve got to help me find them.”

“If you’re so brilliant,
you
find them.”

“Bet I can,” said Pandora.

“Bet you can’t.”

“How much?”

“A game of Monopoly?” said Titus with faint hope.

“NEVER,”
yelled Pandora. “Frankly, I’d rather swim a lap across the moat than play with
you.
”

“Big words, big deal, Pandora. You’re all talk and no action. Inside you’re just a fluff-brained
girl.
You’d never
dare.
”

Livid with rage, Pandora forgot to engage her brain before opening her mouth. “I bet I CAN find them,” she shrieked. “AND I WOULD, TOO, DARE! AND I’M NOT JUST
TALKING!
”

“No,” agreed Titus, “you’re shouting. And your eyes have gone all funny.”

“I’m not SHOUTING,” Pandora insisted. “I’ll find the rat babies or I’ll swim the moat.
Done.
Satisfied?”

“You’re kidding,” gasped Titus. “You can hardly swim, let alone fight off crocodiles.”

“You’re the one who needs water wings and an inner tube, Titus.” Her voice wobbled dangerously. “And when I say done, I mean it.”