Pure Dead Wicked (12 page)

The Beastly Blues

U
naware that the world around them had been plunged into midwinter twilight, the beasts had been digging an escape tunnel by Braille. Earlier that afternoon, they'd come to a unanimous decision to run away, since their future in a Bogginview bungalow seemed fraught with difficulties. Incorrectly assuming that they were unloved since the BMW-torching episode, they put an escape plan into operation. They toyed with the idea of burning down the locked stable door with dragon flame, or simply smashing it to smithereens by beast power, but after much debate, they decided that digging their way out would give them several hours of freedom before anyone noticed that they'd gone. Several hours later, a vast mound of recently dug earth towered over the tunnel, round which Sab, Ffup, and Knot stood whispering words of encouragement down to Tock.

“Can't see a thing,” muttered the crocodile, his front paws sending up a continual shower of earth and pebbles.

“D'you need a break?” said Ffup, looking up from manicuring his talons. “Shall I warm your poor wee paws up a bit?”

“No, thank you,” said Tock. “Crispy claws are not my idea of a helpful suggestion.”

“What happens when we're out?” demanded Sab. “Has anyone thought that far ahead? Then what? Where do we go from here?”

“Back home,” sniffed the dragon. “Back to our lovely dungeon. I'll get a fire going, you catch us some grub. . . .”

“I don't eat meat,” Tock reminded them, in between pawfuls of grassy earth.

“We'll find you some winter greens in the kitchen garden, then,” said Ffup, “and then . . . well, we'll just have to be self-sufficient, won't we?”

“DONE IT!” yelled Tock. “We're FREE!”

Freezing air poured in through the escape tunnel as the beasts hurriedly packed their meager possessions and headed for the wide-open spaces of the Auchenlochtermuchty Arms parking lot. The recent power cut had worked to their advantage, as all the street lamps were temporarily extinguished. Tock led his co-conspirators toward the river, which flowed in the direction of Lochnagargoyle, the sea loch overlooked by StregaSchloss. The beasts followed a circuitous route through Auchenlochtermuchty, emerging at last into the fields that marked the outskirts of the village. Spattered with mud and chilled to the marrow, they began to wonder if they'd Done The Right Thing.

They stood in a huddle at the edge of a turnip field and tried to get their bearings.

“What's that
shhhlepp shhhlepp
noise?” whispered Sab, clutching the dragon's arm. “It's coming closer now. Can you hear it?”

“I think it's me,” admitted Knot, stopping in his tracks and sitting down abruptly. “It's my fur, dragging through the mud.”

“Where
are
we?” wailed Ffup. “I don't recognize any of this. . . .” Over their heads, a pitiless December sky stretched blackly in all directions.

“I smell something,” said Sab.

“I think it's me,” confessed Knot. “It usually is. . . .”

“No, it's not you, this time.” The griffin sniffed loudly, his curved nostrils expanding alarmingly. “It's more like raw lamb. . . .”

Borne on the wind toward where they stood shivering was an unmistakable
baa-baa
.

“Did you hear that?” Sab nudged Ffup. “Meals-on-hooves sort of sound?”

“I always did prefer my lamb underdone,” mused Ffup. “Two minutes each side. . . .”

“No meat for me,” Tock reminded them.

“Oh, quit being so picky, would you? If we were stranded on a desert island, you'd soon learn to eat meat again.”

“I'd rather starve.”

“The way I see it, my stubborn friend,” said Ffup, wrapping a wing around the sulking crocodile and drawing him to one side, “is that you have some tough choices up ahead. You can join me and the boys as we pick ourselves some free-range lamb, or, as you said, you can starve . . . or”—the dragon indicated the vast expanse of field ahead of them—“you could dine in style on raw muddy turnips. What's it to be?”

Tock weighed the options open to him and sighed. “I suppose if you cook meat for me, it would be rude to refuse.”

“Come on then. Let's go get them!” And with a ponderous flap of his leathery wings, Ffup took to the skies, followed by Sab.

The moon came out from behind a bank of snow clouds and cast their twin wheeling shadows into sharp relief against the frozen ruts of the field below. Following behind, awkwardly earthbound, came Knot and Tock, stumbling over turnips and breaking through the icy crust on the occasional puddle. The
baa-baa
sound came closer and louder now. Dinner was growing nervous.

Clones on the Rampage

S
hrouded in gloom, the Strega-Borgias returned to the hotel in Vincent Bella-Vista's white van. The journey proved to be a singularly unpleasant one due to the odor emanating from dozens of discarded Styrofoam containers, whose decomposing contents bore witness to the builder's fondness for beefburgers and his inability to finish anything he started. Attempting to make conversation with Vincent Bella-Vista, Signor Strega-Borgia found a tiny bit of common ground between Bogginview and StregaSchloss.

“Your chandelier . . . ,” he began, “reminded me of the one at StregaSchloss. . . . Of course, ours is an ancient old thing, been hanging there for about four hundred years. . . .”

Vincent Bella-Vista yawned widely, and grunted to indicate that he was listening.

Signor Strega-Borgia continued, “D'you know, I've often wondered if the legend of the Borgia Diamond is true. . . .”

Sitting next to his father, Titus groaned. Not
that
old thing again. Boring, boring, boring. He rolled his eyes at Pandora as their father droned on.

“. . . apparently, or so I was told by my grandfather, one of the crystal teardrops on our chandelier is rumored to be a diamond, hidden up there by a long-dead relative, Malvolio di S'Enchantedino Borgia, during the Mhoire Ochone Uprising of . . . um . . . er . . .”

“Sixteen forty-eight,” muttered Signora Strega-Borgia, adding, “Or so they
say
. Honestly, darling, if it were true, we would hardly be about to sell StregaSchloss to Mr. Belle Atavista here, would we? We'd be selling the diamond and using the proceeds to mend our poor . . . our lovely . . . oh, Lucianoooo.” She stopped, tears spilling down her face.

At this unhappy moment, the van's headlights picked out the profile of the Auchenlochtermuchty Arms, wreathed in fog and, regrettably, still without electricity. On the desk in the reception area, an oil lamp threw just enough light to enable the family to pick their way to the residents' lounge. To Titus and Pandora's relief, sitting on either side of a blazing fire were Latch and Mrs. McLachlan, deep in the final stages of a game of Monopoly, which, judging by the number of houses and hotels littering the board, had been going on all afternoon. This fireside cameo was so reminiscent of rainy winter days spent in the library at StregaSchloss that the family felt their bleak mood recede slightly.

Signor Strega-Borgia moved a chair closer to the fire. Maybe it might be possible to re-create some of the ambience, if not the identical surroundings of StregaSchloss, he thought, staring into the flames.

If we got rid of that ghastly carpet and brought some of our own books and paintings, perhaps even Bogginview could become a home for us all, thought Signora Strega-Borgia, curling onto a sofa.

No such domestic concerns entered the heads of Titus and Pandora. Their shared preoccupation was with the clones and what had happened in their caretakers' absence. Excusing themselves, they made for the stairs.

Four flights up, they found an abandoned flashlight lying in an alcove. As Titus turned it on, its beam swept across the cobwebby ceiling, causing Pandora to be struck by an unhappy thought.

“Tarantella . . . ,” she moaned, grabbing Titus's arm. “If there's no roof left at StregaSchloss, then there's no attic, either. Oh, poor her. . . .” She slumped against the wall and groaned.

“Come on,” Titus sighed. “Never mind that horrible tarantula, we have to deal with the clones.”

“
Your
clones,” said Pandora, following reluctantly upstairs. “
My
spider. I didn't get us into this mess, Titus.”

“Help me out here, would you?” said Titus. “We'll try and hide the clones somewhere no one can hear them and then, I promise, I'll come back to StregaSchloss with you and we'll find your spider.”

“And Multitudina and Terminus?”

“You drive a hard bargain, but yes, them, too.”

They stopped outside Titus's room. Filtered through the door came music and voices. Little voices. Lots of them. Titus unlocked the door and edged in, followed by Pandora.

A scene of chaos and mayhem greeted them. The clones, mercifully no larger than earlier that day, but regrettably far more vocal, were backlit by Titus's laptop. Absorbed in their own world, they failed to notice the arrival of their giant caretakers.

“They must have broken out of the wardrobe . . . and where did they get that music?” Pandora whispered.

“It's a CD. They're playing it on my laptop, the little toads.”

The little toads gyrated, bumped, and ground to the rhythm. The fact that they were still utterly naked merely added to the overall hideousness. Out from behind the splintered door of the wardrobe came a pungent odor that suggested that though the clones may have mastered the workings of Titus's laptop, the complexities of a toilet still eluded them.

“HEY!” squeaked one of the Titus types. “It's the big dude and dudette! Come in—join the party! What took you so long?”

On the screen of the laptop, a dialogue box informed them that the laptop's battery was heading for pancake status and pretty soon the lights would dim, the music stop, and it would be time to go home. Pandora lit a candle, and in the flare of the match accidentally scorched a clone. Heartlessly running it under the bathroom tap and telling it to quit moaning, she headed back into the bedroom and clapped her hands for attention.

“RIGHT, YOU LOT,” she said in a voice learned firsthand from Mrs. McLachlan, “enough of this nonsense. Turn that racket off, go and wash your faces, and then it's time for bed.”

A communal “Awwww” went up from the clones. Mutters of “That's not fair” and “Boring” were ignored as the tribe of clones trooped obediently into the bathroom.

Titus was seriously impressed. His immediate response to the sight of the clone revel was to lie down on the carpet and sob, but his sister had managed to get the situation under control in one minute flat.

“Right, Titus,” she said, still in McLachlan mode, “you supervise face washing and I'll go and find somewhere for them to sleep.” Placing the candle on her brother's bedside table, she tiptoed out into the corridor. A dim light filtered up from downstairs as she groped her way along the landing. Encountering one of the many vast radiators that normally hissed and bubbled all night long, she noticed that it was stone cold. Opposite the radiator, the door to the linen cupboard stood open. Reaching inside, Pandora helped herself to a large pile of woollen blankets and continued on her passage down the darkened landing. Just as she was about to give up and try another floor, she saw the perfect solution to the clone-containment problem. A hatch halfway up the wall proclaimed itself to be a service lift. On the brass plate engraved with this information were two unlit buttons and a small notice that read:

STAFF ONLY
IN THE EVENT OF A POWER FAILURE, PLEASE USE THE MANUAL PULLEY

The service lift must have stopped somewhere between floors when the power cut occurred. Sure that even the most determined clones couldn't break out of what was, in effect, a ventilated metal safe, Pandora opened the hatch and peered inside. In the darkness, she made out a brass wheel roughly the size of a dinner plate. She groped in the dark and began to turn the wheel clockwise. From far below her feet, a distant rumble told her that the lift was on its way.

Meanwhile, Titus had raided both Latch's and his own supply of socks in order to provide some of the clones with a rudimentary form of clothing to protect them from the ravages of a Scottish winter in a currently unheated hotel. Using the butler's toenail clippers, Titus gouged a neck hole in the toe of each sock, shredded two armholes in either side, and dragged the woolly tubes over the protesting heads of as many clones as he could find socks for. Turning his attention to the remainder of the naked clones, who huddled shivering on his bed, he began to cut a hotel towel into tiny squares and, with a hole chewed in the center of each square, managed to clothe the sockless clones in tiny toweling ponchos. Ignoring their protests of “I'm not wearing
that
” and “I want an
Adidas
sock, not a boring old woolly one,” Titus stuffed the last Titus type back into the sock from which it had been trying to escape and sat down abruptly on the floor.

He was
exhausted
. Around him, sock- and poncho-clad clones yawned and whined incessantly, their twitching bodies casting giant candlelit shadows on the wall behind them.

Titus was nearly asleep when Pandora poked her head round the door and beckoned him over. “We'll have to do this in batches,” she said. “How many d'you think we can carry at a time?”

“No more than ten.”

“That won't work. It would take us all night. . . .” Pandora looked at the herds of clones lolling on Titus's bed, comparing socks and ponchos.

“The bedspread,” Titus said. “We can bundle them all up in it and carry them in one go.”

The clones were less than keen on this plan for their travel arrangements. Bundled ignominiously into a candlewick bedspread and then dragged bumpily along the corridor, they protested loudly. At the end of the corridor, the service lift yawned open. Pandora had carefully lined its floor with blankets to deaden the noise and to provide some insulation against the chill of the metal lift. Such thoughtfulness failed to impress the clones. Their protests became more shrill as Titus and Pandora heaved the candlewick bundle into the empty lift.

“Oh, do shut
up,
” said Pandora, slamming the door on their howls of outrage and beginning to turn the wheel. The noise diminished with each turn until, finally giving it four complete turns for good measure, Pandora closed the hatch and slumped against the wall. Downstairs, the clock in reception chimed eight o'clock. Dinnertime. “I'll meet you by the front door at midnight,” she said. “And pray that the power stays off till then.”

“There are some advantages to having no electricity.” Titus grinned. “I can guarantee that there will be no Brussels sprouts with dinner. . . .”