Floods 5 (7 page)

The light coming out of Grusom's Big Blue FSI Torch was black.

When the Flood children's parents, Nerlin and Mordonna, had met and fallen in love, they had been forced to flee their homeland of Transylvania Waters to escape the uncontrollable anger of Mordonna's father. Mordonna was the elder of King Quatorze's two daughters and therefore the top princess in the whole country. She was also the only one of his two daughters who did not have very hairy nostrils, green skin with red bits and have her feet shod at the blacksmiths.

Nerlin was not a prince.
²⁷
He was a humble lavatory cleaner, one of the dirt people who lived in the drains beneath the city.
²⁸

When the two lovers had fled, the king had sent his most trusted and evil spy, the Hearse Whisperer, after them with instructions to kill everyone except Mordonna, who was to be brought back to Transylvania Waters. Incredibly, the escapees managed to give the Hearse Whisperer the slip and live quietly with their seven children in a quiet suburban street called Acacia Avenue. The Hearse Whisperer searched everywhere, but because witches and wizards are very superstitious and one of the things they fear more than anything else are acacias – though no one knows why – the Hearse Whisperer kept well away from any roads, streets, lanes and avenues called Acacia.

But she had not given up her search and she had finally discovered that five of Mordonna's children went to Quicklime's. Considering all the Floods were witches and wizards and there was only one witch and wizard school in the whole world, she should have worked it out years ago. The trouble was, the Hearse Whisperer thought everyone was as evil and devious as she was. So she assumed that Mordonna and Nerlin wouldn't send their children to Quicklime's in case the King tracked them down. The trick, of course, is to be double devious and do the most obvious thing, because that's the last thing your enemies think you'll do.

The Hearse Whisperer had sat in a dark cave in a deep forest in the frozen depths of Outer Mongolia, where she always went when she needed to concentrate. Using her brand new laptop, she had tried to make a plan, but it was too dark to see the letters on the keyboard. She went and sat outside in the daylight, which she hated, and then it was too bright to see the screen. So she turned the laptop into a toad and sucked its insides out
through its nostrils. This made her feel a lot better, but meant she had to go back to using a crayon and some paper.

Simply killing the Flood children would not do. She would certainly enjoy it, but it wouldn't get her any closer to Mordonna. Also, she wasn't sure how the King would feel about having his own grandchildren killed. That sort of thing had never bothered the King's ancestors, but having seen the almost gentle way this King pulled the wings off dragonflies, she suspected he might have a softer side than he was letting on. Of course, the King didn't actually know he had any grandchildren apart from the seven green scaly creatures Mordonna's sister, Howler, had presented him with.

No, the best course of action would be to follow the children home from school and find out where Mordonna and her family were living. She knew that the children lived on the other side of the world and travelled to and from school on a magic dragon bus each day. The obvious thing would be to hide in the back of the bus. But there
was a problem, a problem she could find no way round.

She didn't have a bus pass.

After a near-fatal incident, Quicklime's had become really, really strict about bus passes. Not even a cockroach could get on board without one – which was good because it had been a cockroach crawling up the driver's nose that had caused the accident.

The Hearse Whisperer needed a much more complicated plan, something so complicated that no one would ever suspect it was a plan.

She would put a dead body in the school and then throw suspicion on the Floods. They would all be arrested and then, and then, umm … Maybe she'd disguise herself as a pair of handcuffs or, er … Well, she'd sort that bit out later.

She would call her plan – this brilliant plan that would go down in the history of plans as the cleverest and most devious plan ever – she would call it the Dead Belgian Professor Plan.

This was the plan:

1. Get a dead Belgian Professor.
   
2. Move his body to Quicklime College.
   
3. Throw suspicion on one of the Flood children.
   
4. Repeat step 3 until all five children are under suspicion.
   
5. Change into a geranium and wait.
   
6. Get a new crayon to write steps 7 to 15.
   

It was brilliant and it was so complicated and devious that even the Hearse Whisperer herself did not know what would happen next.

Never mind,
she thought.
First things first. Where will I get a dead Belgian professor?

The second thing she thought was,
Maybe I should have done that bit before I turned myself into a geranium.

Starting again, the Hearse Whisperer quickly discovered that dead Belgian professors do not grow on trees.
²⁹
Undaunted, she decided she would make a fake one out of a living person and, just to add a bit of excitement and risk, she would use a person who was neither Belgian nor a professor. The person she chose was Klaus von Klaus, an international bus ticket forger who was hiding out from Interpol on a tiny island in Tristan da Cunha. She chose him for several reasons:

1. No one would miss him.
   
2. He looked Belgian.
   
3. He had a really annoying name.
   
4. He had once sold the Hearse Whisperer a fake 1897 Chinese bus ticket and she wanted revenge.
   
5. He had a moustache in the shape of Tasmania.
   
6. He actually thought
   Australian Idol
   was a good TV programme.
   

So she had started to go through steps one to five of the plan. She hadn't counted on the school calling in the FSI people after she'd arranged the body in the graveyard, but when she discovered what an idiot their chief investigator was, an evil smile lit up her face.

The plan was going according to plan. It hadn't taken much to throw suspicion on the Flood children – a dog lead with Satanella Flood's initials on it, stealing the twins' fingerprints, and since Winchflat had offered to help with the investigation, that made the stupid FSI man suspect the Floods even more. All she had to do was wait until they were arrested and then … and then, umm …

Well, she'd sort that bit out later.

She also had to get rid of the body. Grusom was an idiot but his beautiful assistant wasn't, and it was only a matter of time before she realised there was something strange about it.

‘My blue torch!' Grusom was still shaking his head over the heinous crime that had been committed. ‘That's it. It's time for the magic beans.' He got out his tin opener. ‘This calls for the beans with the extra thick tomato sauce.'

He threw a handful of magic beans in the air and nothing happened. This was because the extra thick tomato sauce was so thick that all the beans stayed stuck to his hands. He took a deep breath, flexed his muscles and threw as hard as he could. All the beans stuck on the ceiling.

‘Interesting,' he said. ‘That's never happened before … but then I've never had a corpse stolen
from my examination table before, either.'

Several magic beans fell down the front of Avid's top and even when Grusom called them to heel, they refused to come back. Mysteriously, the rest of the beans fell on the floor and spelled out the words:

‘So what do we do now, boss?' Avid asked. ‘I mean, without a body, we have no proof there's even been a murder.'

‘We have witnesses who saw the body,' said Grusom. ‘Dozens of them.'

‘I don't think we can count on any of them,' said Avid. ‘I mean, they're all witches and wizards. We're outsiders here.'

‘True, but we'll still put out the wanted posters for all the Flood kids,' said Grusom. ‘I'm sure they
know more than they're telling us.'

Grusom tried to examine the room with his very big Forensic Special Investigator's Magnifying Glass, but the Hearse Whisperer had turned it inside out
³⁰
so it now made everything look very small and an extremely long way away.

‘The potted plant's gone too,' said Avid, not realising the geranium had been the Hearse Whisperer in disguise.

They spent ten minutes looking through all the cupboards and drawers in case the body had somehow got into one of them, which of course it hadn't, but when something as totally unexpected as a body vanishing into thin air happens, it's the sort of thing you do. They even looked in the corridor outside the room, in the waste-paper basket and the ice compartment of the fridge.

The body was not there.

That evening as they hid in the graveyard deciding what to do next, Winchflat told the others what he had discovered. His nose hairs had tingled for a reason, and now he knew what it was. The Hearse Whisperer had found them.

They all knew about the Hearse Whisperer. Mordonna had told them how evil the Hearse Whisperer was and how Mordonna's father, King Quatorze, had sent the evil spy after them when she had eloped with their father. It had been an exciting, scary bed-time story, made even more exciting and scary because it was true.

Mordonna had told them all they must be always on their guard so as not to give away their hiding place at Acacia Avenue, for the Hearse Whisperer was the kind of creature who would never give up until she had found them.

To protect them all, Winchflat had built a Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device. Using no more than a single speck of the Hearse Whisperer's dandruff that Mordonna had picked out of the ear of Ooze, one of her father's spies,
³¹
an old mobile phone, three tonnes of broccoli and several small insects, Winchflat set to work. The first version was so big it had to be towed around in a trailer, but in the same way that the first computers were bigger than a house and are now so small they can fit in a watch, each version of the detector got smaller and smaller until it fitted into a button.

‘Brilliant,' said Nerlin. ‘We can each have one sewn on our clothes so we'll always know when we're in danger.'

‘Except when we don't have any clothes on,' said Morbid. Silent sniggered.

‘You could always sew it onto your ear,' said Merlinmary, having a happy little daydream of blood dripping from everyone's head.

‘Well, it still needs a bit of work,' said Winchflat. He stood up and his trousers fell round his ankles with a crash.

‘As I was saying,' he explained, ‘it still needs a bit of work. I've managed to make it really small but it still weighs three hundred kilos.'

There were a few teething problems. Whenever anyone wearing a detector went within fifty metres of traffic lights they would suddenly change – not from red to green or green to red but into giant three-metre-tall pink marshmallows. Funny things happened at supermarket checkouts, too, whenever anyone wearing a Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device passed by in the street. If the customer was a nice person, their bill would come out as twenty-five cents, no matter how much they had bought. If they were a nasty person, their
credit card would melt inside the machine so they couldn't buy anything.

Even when Winchflat sorted out all the problems, sometimes as an aeroplane flew over the Floods' house all its toilets would flush for no reason. Eventually it was agreed that just Winchflat would wear the Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device, and he would tell the others if it went into danger mode – which it had.

‘Well, we can't just stay here in these rotting coffins,' said Merlinmary. ‘I'm getting backache.'

‘And I'm getting mould between my toes,' said Satanella.

‘You've always got mould between your toes,' said Morbid.

‘Oh yes, so I have.'

The children were each hiding inside a coffin in the school graveyard and, as coffins are usually made to hold only one person and some of the bodies still had quite a bit of meat on them and were leaking, the children were all feeling very uncomfortable and damp in unpleasant places.

‘I think the first thing we need to do is get out of here,' said Winchflat. ‘Then we'll decide the best place to hide and how to get there.'

‘OK,' said Merlinmary. ‘How about we all dig downwards and meet in the catacombs. At least the corpses are less leaky there.'

‘It's always catacombs, isn't it?' Merlinmary complained. ‘Why can't they ever be dogacombs?'

‘Hold on, everyone,' said Winchflat. ‘Before you start digging, I better check where the Hearse Whisperer is.' He switched on his Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device. ‘That's strange, she appears to be burying a dead body on a little island off Tristan da Cunha.'

They didn't know that the dead body was the fake professor and that the Hearse Whisperer had just stolen it from the school.

‘That is strange,' said Satanella. ‘Why would she go there?'

‘Don't know,' said Winchflat. ‘But the really strange thing is why she's burying it. I mean, she usually eats dead bodies or drops them off tall buildings onto innocent passers-by.'

‘Maybe it's like squirrels when they bury nuts to eat later,' said Satanella.

‘No, I reckon she's probably hiding it,' said Merlinmary.

‘At least it should be safe to move from these coffins at the moment,' said Winchflat. ‘Let's go.'

When they gathered at the cemetery gate, they saw the wanted posters. They were stuck on every available flat surface they could see.

‘I hate that picture of me,' said Satanella. ‘It makes me look like a hairy Jack Russell and I hate Jack Russells – nasty little hyperactive balls of gristle.'

‘I think now might be a good time to leave,' said Winchflat. ‘While those idiot FSI people are asleep and the Hearse Whisperer is busy.'

So they went down into the catacombs, finished picking the bits of flaky corpse off each other, sprayed themselves with FesterClear air freshener, which Winchflat always carried in one of his many Very Useful Pockets, and discussed the best place to go and hide.

‘How about Patagonia?' said Merlinmary. ‘I've always wanted to go there.'

‘Umm, yes, brilliant,' said Satanella. ‘Except we're actually in Patagonia right now.'

‘Oh. It's not at all how I imagined it would be from the David Attenborough programmes.'

‘The last place the Hearse Whisperer would look would be Tristan da Cunha,' said Morbid. ‘If we wait until she leaves, we could go and hide on the island where she's burying the dead body.'

‘That,' said Winchflat, ‘is a brilliant idea. The trouble is that because it is so brilliant and the last place she would look, it's probably the first place she would check.'

‘No, no,' said Silent inside Winchflat's head, ‘the last place she would look would be Transylvania Waters.'

‘That's way too risky,' said Winchflat. ‘Even though no one from there has ever seen us so they wouldn't know who we were.'

‘We could stay here,' said Merlinmary.

‘Second place she'll look and first place those FSI people will look,' said Winchflat. ‘No, I have an idea. We'll go and visit my internet friend, Lord Clacton.'

‘Who?' said Merlinmary, Satanella and the twins.

‘Lord Clacton. He's my best friend and, for a human, quite intelligent,' Winchflat explained. ‘He's often helped me with some of my inventions and I'm helping him build a time machine. It'll be the perfect place to go. I've never met him, not in person, and he lives in a deserted desert village fifty-three miles from the nearest town, which is miles from anywhere.'

‘Where's that?' said Satanella.

‘Timbuktu.'

‘Isn't that a type of parrot?' said Merlinmary.

Once they had established that Timbuktu was a city in North Africa and not a type of parrot, they had to decide how to get from the remote Patagonian valley near the bottom of South America to the remote Saharan town in North Africa. They could:

1. Walk: Mostly this would mean walking under water or on top of the water. All witches can of course do both, but it was
   a very long way and Satanella in particular had very short legs.
   
2. Fly: The obvious choice, which meant it was the most risky. Not only would the Hearse Whisperer be scanning the air, but so would the FSI people.
   
3. Use a Star Trek Transporter: Difficult because there is no such thing.
   
4. Post: Send themselves in a big parcel.
   
5. Use Winchflat's Shrink-You-As-Small-As-A-Speck-Of-Dust-Transport-You-Somewhere-Then-Enlarge-You-Again-Machine– aka the Zoomy Thing.
   ³²
   

Although Winchflat's Zoomy Thing was the size of a wardrobe and normally lived in his bedroom at home in Acacia Avenue, by an incredible stroke
of good luck, the last time he'd left home he had shrunk it down small enough to fit into yet another of his Very Useful Pockets and brought it to school with him.

He had never done this before.

‘I don't know why I brought it,' he said as he restored it to its full size. ‘Just some strange premonition – a sort of Oprah moment, I suppose.'

They all squeezed inside, Winchflat fiddled with the controls and they vanished.