Pure Dead Magic (5 page)

Despite her bluster, reality was dawning. What on earth was she doing, agreeing to swim across the moat? Tock was starving.
Ravenous. Hadn’t eaten a nanny for at least two weeks. “I mean it, Titus, but—”

“Ah! I knew there would be a but. No, you can’t wear a suit of armor to swim in. Tock hates tinned food and, no, you may not feed Tock an elephant before you begin.”

“You seem awfully confident that I won’t find Multitudina’s ratettes.”

“You could say that,” Titus said smugly. “But before you ask, I haven’t touched them, harmed them, or even seen the ghastly beasts since last night. Now … 
but
what?”

“But … I need a week to find them.”

“Three days.”

“Five days, then. Come on, Titus, play fair.”

“In five days, that disgusting rat slob could produce another litter.”

“Give me five days to find the missing babies, and if I don’t, I’ll swim the moat,” said Pandora, crossing her fingers tightly.

“Deal,” said Titus.

Beasts in the Basement

D
amp sat tethered to her high chair, watching Mrs. McLachlan prepare dinner. In a corner of the Schloss kitchen, Latch ironed the current edition of the
Financial Times,
and Marie Bain stuck out her tongue at her reflection in the mirror.

“Ees no goot,” she decided. “Meesuss McCacclong, I not feel well.”

“Never mind, dear,” said Mrs. McLachlan vaguely. “Just give me a hand with these chopped livers, and then you can have a wee lie-down.”

Marie Bain reluctantly dragged herself away from the mirror and came over to the table where Mrs. McLachlan stood stirring, wrist-deep in gore, adding cubes of bloody jelly to a vast cauldron full of wriggling pinkness. Marie Bain’s eyes widened as she beheld the contents of the cauldron.

Mrs. McLachlan smiled kindly as she scooped out a heaving spoonful and offered it to the glassy-eyed cook.

“Now,
you’re
the expert, dear,” she said ingratiatingly. “I don’t know if I’ve put enough salt in. Have a wee taste and tell me what you think?”

Marie Bain turned an unbecoming shade of green, and with a gargle like a drain coming finally unblocked, leaned over the cauldron and was copiously sick within.

Damp covered her eyes with her hands and gave a small moan. Latch rolled his eyes heavenward and pressed on, thankful that someone had at last passed comment on the merit of Mrs. McLachlan’s current culinary offering. Nasty foreign muck, why didn’t she stick to what she was good at, like fries? Still … at least
he
wouldn’t have to eat it. Not now.

Mrs. McLachlan tsked and stirred in Marie Bain’s contribution. “If you think so, dear,” she said, utterly unflappable. “Still, myself, I would have added a teeny bit more salt. Let’s see what the wee pets think, shall we?”

The nanny swept past Damp, kicked open the door to the dungeon, and disappeared downstairs, calling, “Wakey, wakey. Dinnertime. Here’s Nanny with some tasty numns for the wee pets.”

The dungeon was home to Knot the yeti, Sab the griffin, and Ffup the dragon, none of whom qualified even remotely for the collective title of “wee pets.” For starters, they were enormous.

Ffup, not fully grown, was the size of a stretch limousine and was expected in adulthood to attain the dimensions of an average bungalow. Knot was eight feet of hulking, matted hairiness and Sab resembled a leather lion with wings. For the previous six hundred years, they had functioned admirably, if a tad erratically, as forms of guard dogs, patrolling the acres around StregaSchloss and devouring intruders. More recently,
with the advent of the postal service and the consequent daily visits by postmen and other unplanned deliveries, the Strega-Borgias had decided that it might be safer to keep the beasts under some form of control. Hence the ropes, chains, and leashes on the hall table, and the need for cages in the dungeon.

They gathered in the gloom, nostrils aquiver, united in their disdain for Mrs. McLachlan’s offering.

“What d’you call this slop?” roared Ffup, snorting twin bursts of fire through the bars of his cage. Sab flapped leathery wings in a menacing fashion and spat onto the dungeon floor.

Undaunted, Mrs. McLachlan unlocked the cage door and edged inside, dragging the brimming cauldron behind her. “I’ll have none of that adolescent nonsense, Ffup, and as for you, Sab, didn’t your mother teach you never to spit?”

A stunned silence greeted her query. Didn’t she understand that she was supposed to run away screaming for help, not deliver a lecture on correct behavior? Knot shuffled forward, his matted hair clotted with the festering remains of many dribbled dinners. He dipped a paw into the cauldron and was just about to have an exploratory lick when Mrs. McLachlan grabbed both his paws, turned them palm upward, and tsked mightily. “I thought so …,” she said grimly. “Upstairs with you, and wash those paws properly before dinner. What d’you think you are, a wild animal?”

Knot burst into tears and shuffled blindly upstairs.

“Me too,” yelled Ffup. “I haven’t washed my claws for at least six hundred years.” The dragon leapt after Knot, trailing little plosive puffs of smoke in his wake.

Sab folded his wings over his eyes and turned to stone.

“Not hungry, pet?” inquired Mrs. McLachlan solicitously,
ladling her stew into three metal troughs. From upstairs, an earsplitting scream shattered the subterranean calm of the dungeon. Mrs. McLachlan sighed. One of Marie Bain’s many peccadilloes was her inability ever to come to terms with sharing a roof with the beasts. “Pull yourself together, dear,” shouted Mrs. McLachlan. “They’re more frightened of you than you are of them.…”

Arachnids in the Attic

P
andora lifted the lid of the freezer and bailed out several boxes of fish sticks, a tray of profiteroles, and three half-eaten tubs of ice cream.

Strega-Nonna lay at the bottom of the freezer, her small body wrapped in twelve layers of aluminum foil, her head framed in a ghostly halo of frosty white hair.

“Nonna,” whispered Pandora, “you haven’t seen Multitudina around, have you?”

“There’s not much of a view inside here,” came the faint reply, and “Shut the lid, child, you’re letting the heat in.”

Heck, thought Pandora, dropping the lid on her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother’s tomb. What now? Four and a half days left, and not a rat dropping to be found. Sighing heavily, and abandoning the fish sticks, profiteroles, and ice cream on the floor of the wine cellar, Pandora trekked up eight flights of stairs to the Schloss attic, a vast
family museum of a loft space, full of dust and cobwebs, home to generations of spiders, woodworms, and roosting bats. It was stuffed to the eaves with ancestral memories of Borgias long gone: several hundred oil paintings of family members, trunkloads of love letters, death threats, and ancient shopping lists, a stableful of outgrown rocking horses, eight canary cages in varying stages of collapse, and, spanning the entire length of the attic, a teetering mountain range of magazines and books.

Pandora raised the heavy trapdoor and climbed in. Light filtered through ropes of spiderwebs, picking out what appeared to her to be an absolute rat Mecca. A million places to hide, a million things to chew, and a million ways to make sure your mistress has to do a synchronized swim with a ravenous reptile.

“Come on, Multitudina,” she croaked, trying to sound enticing through a throatful of dust.

Nothing stirred.

“This is no place to raise a family,” she tried, hoping to appeal to the rodent’s dismaying lack of maternal instincts. Several spiders paused in their spinning, debated whether to argue with this hairless biped, and decided against it. “PLEASE COME BACK,” Pandora yelled. “MY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!”

She slumped onto a nearby trunk, sending a cloud of dust spiraling upward. From a window came the frantic buzz of a fly attempting to unglue itself from a web. Hypnotized, Pandora watched the fly grow more agitated, its wingbeats becoming an invisible blur, the pitch of its buzzing rising to the insect equivalent of a shriek. The web sagged under the weight of a monstrous spider whose abdomen was the size of a tennis ball, suspended on legs that cried out for shaving cream and a
good razor. The spider wore bright pink lipstick, expertly applied round its mouthparts—a subtlety not lost on its intended victim, the pitch of whose buzzing reached an agonizing high C.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, can’t you die with dignity?” snapped the spider, impatiently tweaking the web tighter.

The fly fell silent, save for the odd whimper.

“Tarantella!” cried Pandora.

“The very same,” replied the spider.

“Pet lamb,” said Pandora, with total disregard for species, “I haven’t seen you for ages.”

Tarantella grinned widely and popped a fly wing into her mouth. She crunched, swallowed, and extended a hairy leg to pat Pandora on the hand.

“So what brings you up here?” she asked, licking her lips with a small black tongue. Pandora found herself mesmerized by Tarantella’s tongue as it sought out every tiny uneaten flake of wing, transferring each minute morsel into her maw and devouring it.…

“I’ve lost Multitudina and the rat babies,” she said.

The spider shut her mouth with a snap. “Good riddance to bad rattish,” she muttered. “And before you even think it—NOT GUILTY.”

“Have you seen them, though?” persisted Pandora.

“Not up here. Not in my domain, thank you. I’d bite her if I caught sight of so much as a whisker.”

“I’ve made a bet with Titus that I’ll find them,” said Pandora miserably.

“A wager?” squeaked the spider, rubbing all eight of her legs together with glee. “What’s the prize?”

“Nothing much, just fourteen rats and the privilege of staying alive.…”

“And the forfeit?” the spider’s mouth gathered into a fuchsia-pink O of horror.

“Swimming the moat,” said Pandora.

“Auuuuk,” squawked Tarantella, remembering several highly unpleasant encounters with water, and ever mindful of the legendary Itsy-Bitsy’s watery fate.

“…  with Tock,” added Pandora.

“Oh, what a tangled web …,” groaned Tarantella sympathetically.

“I’m in a real mess,” agreed Pandora. “Any ideas where that elusive rodent could be?”

The spider fell silent, meditatively twirling a skein of silk around one leg. Her doomed dinner began to thrash from side to side in an attempt to break free, buzzing and wailing as it did so. “How am I supposed to think with that racket going on?” snapped Tarantella, unwrapping the trapped fly and stinging it into silence. “My guess would be anywhere near food. And being a disgusting rat, the older and moldier the food, the better.” She paused to sip the liquid part of the fly from its carapace. “So much more civilized, we spiders, fresh food is far healthier.…”

Pandora watched in fascinated disgust as the spider sucked the fly dry.

“Now, where do we find rotten food?” continued Tarantella, warming to her theme between slurps. “We find it overlooked under sinks, fridges, freezers, and ovens. We find it in trash buckets, wheelie bins, and wastebaskets. However, these days we also find it in hospitals, schools, and old people’s homes.…”

“Thanks,” interrupted Pandora, desperately trying to avoid a Tarantella tirade. “Heavens, is that the time? Golly, must dash.”

She backed away, waving limply as the spider continued.

“Incidentally in airplanes, prisons, and nasty foreign kitchens …” Tarantella ran out of locations as Pandora slid through the trapdoor. “Don’t you worry,” she called, waving goodbye with all eight legs. “Between us we’ll find her. I’ve friends in high places. I’ll put out some feelers.…”

At Home with the di S’Embowelli Borgias