Pure Dead Wicked (16 page)

Totally unnerved, Pylum-Haight fled for safety. Stumbling up the stairs, he found himself in the kitchen. A bitter wind blew through the open door leading to the kitchen garden, and across the floor a trail of muddy footprints led to the dungeons. Echoing up from their depths, a series of slobbering gobbling sounds seemed to indicate that Ffion would not be following behind him. Cravenly, Hugh Pylum-Haight decided to take her Land Rover and escape by road.

 

Outside in the kitchen garden, Ffup was still squatting over the parsley, sighing mightily and hoping that her quick bathroom stop might relieve the strange feeling in her tummy. The dragon stood up, dabbing ineffectually at her bottom with what appeared, in the darkness, to be a small towel. Nope, that hasn't done the trick, tummy still feels weird, thought Ffup, groaning miserably. She couldn't work out what was wrong with her. She'd been feeling ravenous, off and on, all night, but now she just felt nauseous. Rubbing her tender stomach, she turned toward the house.

A figure bolted out of the kitchen and ran headlong into the dragon, its head making painful contact with Ffup's abdomen. There was a shriek, a lethal blast of dragon flame, and Ffup ran screaming into the house. In the kitchen garden, drenched in dragon pee, the hapless towel-clad clone that Ffup had mistaken for toilet paper crept closer to the incinerated and still smoldering remains of Hugh Pylum-Haight and attempted to dry herself in the warmth.

“Ambulance!
Help!
I've crisped somebody!” wailed Ffup, skidding across the kitchen and into the corridor. The stench of burning roofer clung nauseatingly to her nostrils. “Urghhh, I'm going to be si—” Ffup hauled open the door to the downstairs bathroom, failing to notice the three bullet holes, or the fact that she'd wrenched the door off its hinges in her efforts to obtain access. Just in time, the dragon managed to get her head down the toilet and immediately emptied her insulted stomach of its cargo of half-digested seaweed and a few lumps of mutton.

Wedged overhead, her feet against one wall, her back against another, with Damp cradled asleep across her lap, Mrs. McLachlan tutted. “What
have
you been eating? Och, you poor wee pet. . . .”

Startled to hear herself addressed by such a sympathetic toilet, Ffup banged her head on the cistern as she peered upward. Mrs. McLachlan beamed down at her from the ceiling and pressed a warning finger to her lips.

On the other side of the ruined door, a voice complained, “Run this past me again. You hurl your engagement ring at me, call me a cheapskate, and run off into the night armed with a rolling pin. I follow you. . . . Halfway here an insane cat falls through my windscreen, claws me to ribbons. . . . I finally make it here to find your motor's got four flat tires, you're out cold on the floor, I have to climb over a body to get in the front door, and all
you
can go on about is a spider with lipstick. Just tell me, in words of one syllable, what the devil is going on.”

Another voice, female this time, replied testily, “Aw, shut up, Vinnie. Let's just go back home. Forget I ever mentioned diamonds. This place gives me the creeps.”

“Not till I've found Huey,” came the rejoinder. “I know he's here somewhere. I can smell that poncy aftershave he's always wearing. My guess is he's out on the roof checking out the damage. If
you
can't tell me what's going on, then maybe
he
can. I want an explanation. . . .”

The sound of footsteps going upstairs faded away into silence. Mrs. McLachlan slid down the walls till she came to rest beside Ffup. With a stern warning to guard Damp with her life, she passed the sleeping baby across to the dragon and headed off to try and find Titus and Pandora. The dragon looked down on her slumbering charge. Strange maternal feelings stirred beneath the scales of her breast. Patting Damp gently and tucking the baby deeper under her wing, Ffup settled down on the bathroom floor to wait for Mrs. McLachlan's return.

 

Halfway down the dungeon stairs, Knot lay curled in a massive hairy ball, his hands folded across his distended stomach. He'd devoured Mrs. Fforbes-Campbell in three vast gulps, without pausing to chew between mouthfuls. With his appetite temporarily satisfied, the yeti had fallen into a fitful belching slumber. A few uneaten clumps of Ffion's mink coat dotted the stairs around him, and a crocodile-skin handbag was propped up behind the yeti's head.

Mrs. McLachlan edged past his inert form and descended into darkness. Grunts and squeaks alerted her to the children's whereabouts. Stumbling in the gloom, she caught sight of them eerily lit by Ffion Fforbes-Campbell's abandoned flashlight. Mrs. McLachlan blinked a couple of times and then strode forward, totally unfazed by their headless state.

“Very funny,” she muttered, untying the knots that bound them. “Just tell me what you think you're both doing here in the middle of the night. If your parents knew about this little escapade, they'd have a fit. . . .”

Titus reached up to where his head should have been and produced a soggy rolled-up handkerchief out of thin air. The effect of this was most peculiar. Untainted by vanishing cream, his mouth suddenly appeared, its seeming lack of connection to anything resembling a face producing the weird image of lips waving in space. Beside him, Pandora's mouth appeared likewise.

“It was
her,
” moaned Titus. “Her and her precious spider and rats.”

“Oh,
right
. We're not mentioning
your
clones, are we?” snapped Pandora.

“Clones?” said Mrs. McLachlan. “Just what exactly have you two been up to?”

Both disembodied mouths snapped shut.

Mrs. McLachlan frowned. “Frankly, I'd far rather be tucked up in my nice warm bed than down here freezing to death in the company of several murderous villains, four escapee beasts, and a pair of ungrateful children who haven't the sense to do as they're told—”

From overhead came the sound of a colossal crash. Mrs. McLachlan's eyes widened in alarm. Remembering the nanny's dire warnings about the perilous state of StregaSchloss, Pandora began to cry. “It's going to collapse . . . ,” she wailed. “We'll be buried alive!”

“QUICK!” yelled Titus, grabbing the flashlight. “There's a way out by the moat. Down the sewage tunnel along here—hurry up, we can't hang around here waiting for the walls to come down.”

As if to emphasize the urgency of his words, another crash echoed and reverberated round the dungeon. Trusting that Ffup had enough sense to take Damp and Latch outside to safety, Mrs. McLachlan followed the children down the labyrinthine passages that linked the dungeons to the moat.

Beastly Confessions

P
erched on one of the exposed roof timbers like a living gargoyle, Sab was giving himself a severe talking to.
That
had just been too clumsy for words. Most un-griffin-like behavior. Should be deeply ashamed of yourself. He looked at his curved talons, turning them this way and that and tutting as he did so. What a complete numpty, he chided himself, even though he'd just been trying to help. A few minutes ago, the griffin had come across Vincent Bella-Vista and Vadette, picking their way across a particularly dodgy section of roof, and offered them a helping talon. . . .

Digging those same talons into the roof timber to keep himself from accidentally slipping off into space, Sab looked down through the open heart of StregaSchloss. A vast hole appeared to have been blasted through it from roof to cellar. Splintered wood and shattered plaster still rained down through the hole, pattering and crashing through floors and ceilings, and coming to rest in a pile on the distant floor of the great hall—a pile of timber and rubble under which lay two still figures, their blood leaching out across the floor beneath.

“I can't apologize enough,” whispered the griffin. “So sorry. But you shouldn't have put up such a struggle. I was only trying to help. . . . This roof is so dangerous, and there you were, clambering around on it. And then—well, I'm just
gutted,
frankly. That'll teach me to leave well enough alone. . . .”

With a flap of his leathery wings, Sab glided off his perch and arrowed down, down through the house, through a rising cloud of plaster dust, down to the great hall, where he landed, skidded inelegantly on his slippy talons, and, recovering his balance, came to a standstill beside Latch.

“Um . . . ,” said the griffin, prodding the butler's inert form, “could you wake up and talk to me? Please? I think I've done something awful. . . .”

“Me, too,” said Ffup, emerging from the bathroom with Damp still asleep in the cradle of her wings.

“Well,
I
don't feel in the least bit guilty,” said Knot, appearing at the end of the corridor. “She was
deeelicious
.”

Latch's eyes fluttered open as he tried to focus on the beasts bending over him, their eyes moist with concern.

“We've got something to tell you . . . ,” began Ffup.

“You're going to be awfully vexed,” Sab said, his voice tinged with regret.

 

“Are you
sure
you know where we're going?” Mrs. McLachlan's voice betrayed no sense of the terror she was desperately trying to conceal from the children as she followed them blindly along the tunnels beneath StregaSchloss.

“Er . . . yes,” Titus lied, pausing to lean against the wall and wait for the other two to catch up. His back ached horribly from the crouching gait they'd had to adopt as the roof of the tunnel gradually began to slope down toward the floor. Mrs. McLachlan was completely hunched over, walking like a bear, her hands groping along the floor, feeling for her way in the dim light from Titus's flashlight.

The air in the tunnels was stale and chill, smelling of damp and decay. At one point they'd crossed a fetid puddle: Mrs. McLachlan recognized the reek—it was the recently flushed contents of the downstairs toilet intermingled with other horrors too gruesome to relate. She had wisely kept this information to herself as the children gagged and choked up ahead. Stranded in the shallows were several soggy envelopes and a long, drenched snake of toilet paper. Remembering the long-ago morning when Damp had flushed the post down the toilet, Mrs. McLachlan shuddered in disgust and transferred the soggy envelopes to her breast pocket, a kind of talisman against their return from the tunnels—and also in case they contained anything of importance to the family.

Pandora staggered over to where Titus crouched, waiting for her, and slumped onto the wet floor with a small wail. “We're going to die, Titus,” she said bleakly. “We'll never find our way out. In hundreds of years they'll find our shriveled remains, and we'll end up in a museum labeled
THE BOG DWELLERS OF ARGYLL
.” She closed her eyes and groaned. “I'm so tired. I feel like we've been walking down here for miles and miles. I just wish—” She stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, opened her eyes, and grabbed Titus's arm. “What's that?”

The rhythmic
splash splash
of Mrs. McLachlan's crawling echoed behind them, the sound overlaid now by a quieter pattering noise.

“It sounds like rain,” murmured Titus, peering up ahead into the darkness.

“Can't be,” said Mrs. McLachlan, coming to a halt beside Pandora. “Not down here.”

Titus's flashlight picked out something moving in the distance. “Oh,
no
. . . ,” he groaned. “That's all we need. Disgusting. It's a
rat
.”

Mrs. McLachlan forced herself not to scream. She'd almost grown used to Pandora's pet rats, but wild subterranean ones were a different matter entirely. . . .

“Oh,
yes
!” yelled Pandora, clambering over Titus in her haste. “Don't you see? It's not
a
rat, it's
my
rat! Oh, Titus, we're going to be all right—it's Multitudina!”

Up ahead, Multitudina skidded to a standstill. Doesn't
smell
like her, she decided, blinking as the dancing girl bore down on her. Sounds familiar, though. What on earth is my trained biped doing down here? Further speculation was curtailed as Pandora scooped Multitudina up in her arms and rained kisses down on her head.

“Euchh. Look at its
teeth,
” Titus gagged. “Yellow fangy things. Pandora, you're
weird
. Don't kiss—oh, yeurchh, tell me I'm not related to her.”

Titus and Mrs. McLachlan waited, shuddering with a mixture of cold and disgust as, in between kisses, Pandora explained why they were currently touring StregaSchloss's dungeons.

Finally losing patience with his sister's kiss fest, Titus interrupted. “Listen, Multitudina, if you can lead us out of here, I'll personally empty the contents of the freezer onto the floor and you can eat the lot. That's a promise.”

Needing no further encouragement, the rat wriggled out of Pandora's arms and swam off down the tunnel. She paused to check that the bipeds were following, squeaked her approval, and set off once more.

Splashing behind in Multitudina's wake, Titus, Pandora, and Mrs. McLachlan followed their unlikely savior along the tunnel to freedom.