Floods 6 (10 page)

‘Great show,' said Betty as they walked back to the hotel.

‘Yeah, cool,' said Ffiona.

‘Certainly not what I expected,' said Mrs Hulbert.

Although Valla loved his family, he was by nature a solitary being. He imagined that one day he would meet the right girl and fall in love and get married. He realised that as the eldest of the Flood children it was his responsibility to carry on the great name of Flood, but for the moment he was happiest with his own company and the company of mysterious creatures of the night, who were dark and exciting to be with, but not the sort of beings you would marry or even take home to meet Mum and Dad.

So a holiday, to Valla, meant going out after
dark and wandering the lanes and alleyways and graveyards of the town. While most of Port Folio was asleep, he made new and exciting friends, many of whom lived under stones or in the dark recesses of family vaults. The undead, the freshly dead and the we-want-to-be-dead-but-cannot-die-because-of-an-evil-curse were the creatures Valla felt at home with. Most of them had long since lost their blood, which meant that Valla was never tempted to sink his teeth into their necks. It never ceased to amaze him that a lot of people didn't actually enjoy it when he did that.

Although it was a very small town, Port Folio had two undertakers. This was because it was the sort of place lots of old people went to live when they retired, and old people have a tendency to die more than young people, so there was always enough work to keep both undertakers busy. In fact, sometimes there was too much work and the richer families sent their dead relatives off by parcel post to the extremely expensive Di Calma Crematorium, where they sent the ashes back to
you in an exquisite urn cast from the finest bone china made with your relative's own bones.

Valla hated crematoriums. He thought turning dead bodies into little piles of ash was an unforgivable waste of so many useful things.

‘It's not just the blood,' he said. ‘I mean, look at my shoelaces. They're made from the finest human leg sinews, and my drink bottle is a famous athlete's bladder. There's just so much useful stuff in a dead body.'

‘Absolutely, darling,' Mordonna agreed. ‘Especially nowadays when we are all being told to recycle as much as possible.'

‘And look at that lovely outdoor table and chairs that Father made from those old skeletons,' Valla continued.

‘And if we didn't have those gorgeous skull-top bowls,' said Mordonna, ‘what on earth would I use to make crème brûlée in?'

‘I know,' said Valla, putting his favourite bookmark back in his journal, a bookmark that had once been someone's left ear.

As midnight struck, Valla took his cloak, wrapped it round himself and went out into the town.

‘Don't eat anything I wouldn't, darling,' Mordonna called after him.

This meant he could eat pretty well anything except burgers and chips, but then he would never eat food like that anyway, even if it had clotted blood poured over it. He could still remember how sick he had been when he had eaten a sausage covered in coagulated blood, only to discover it wasn't blood but tomato sauce. He hadn't been able to put anything red in his mouth for days.

Like most places in Port Folio after midnight, the undertakers' building just down the road from the hotel was deserted. All the doors were locked and the lights were out. Even the dustbins round the back were secure behind a tall wire fence. Of course, Valla could have changed himself into a bat and flown over the fence, but it took a lot of energy changing back and forth between creatures and Valla's nose told him there was nothing in the
dustbin worth salvaging. You might think this meant that Valla had a brilliant sense of smell, but he didn't. Instead he pulled his nose off, pushed it through the fence and watched as it wriggled up the side of the bin like a big white slug. It wriggled under the lid and two minutes later came back. Valla stuck it back on his face and took a big sniff.

There was nothing, not even a scab or two, just old teabags and rubbish.

The other undertakers' building, at the poorer end of town away from the beach, was not so neat and tidy. Sure, it was all locked up and dark, but its dustbins were just standing in the alley outside the back door. Valla didn't need to take his nose off to check them out. He didn't even need to lift the lids to know there was treasure there. Its delicate aroma greeted him as soon as he turned into the dark alley. And sure enough both bins were like a fine restaurant, a regular vampire's delicatessen.

The first bin yielded up three fingers and a pair of very hairy nostrils. The second one held the jackpot – an entire foot. Valla collected all the body bits in his environmentally biodegradable non-toxic shopping bag and carried them up to the graveyard, which stood on a small hill behind the town.

As he sat leaning against the gravestone of Mildred Flambard 1783–1803, picking the nasal hairs from between his teeth, he looked out across the town and felt completely at peace with the world. The moon shone across the calm sea. Here
and there a few lights twinkled and a small fishing boat chugged out of the harbour on the early tide.

Life doesn't get much better than this
, he thought as he finished the last of his takeaway snack.

He was about to nod off to sleep when he heard a tapping directly beneath him. As he stood up, the big stone slab he had been sitting on slid aside and a thin arm came up out of the grave.

‘Oww, ahh, ooh,' said a voice from inside the grave.

‘Hello?' said Valla.

‘Oh,' said the voice. ‘I did not realise there was someone there. I do not suppose you could give me a hand, could you? This slab is very heavy. I have been trying to move it every night for … umm, pray tell me, what is the year?'

‘It's two thousand and eight,' said Valla.

‘Mercy me,' said the voice. ‘I have been trying to move this slab for two hundred and five years.'

‘You mean, you've never been able to in all that time?' said Valla, intrigued.

‘No,' said the voice. ‘I am but a frail woman.'

Valla pushed the slab aside and the thin arm was joined by a thin body. Valla reached down, took the hand and helped the body climb out onto the grass.

‘Mildred Flambard, I presume,' he said.

‘Indeed so,' said Mildred. ‘Please do not be frightened.'

‘I'm not,' said Valla, hypnotised by a creature that looked as if it had been dead for years, but was actually still alive.

Sort of.

Mildred's beauty was the sort of beauty men can only dream of. For normal men, and even for most wizards, that dream would be a terrifying nightmare, but for Valla it was a dream of perfection, a dream that filled his head with but one thought –
death doesn't get any better than this
.

‘People are usually petrified,' said Mildred. ‘I do not know why, but the living just do not seem to be able to handle the dead talking to them.'

‘Look at me,' said Valla. ‘Do I look like people?'

‘No, not exactly,' said Mildred. ‘You look as I do. Oh I see, you are dead. Did you just die recently?'

‘I'm not dead,' said Valla, feeling very flattered that Mildred thought he was. ‘I'm a wizard.'

‘Really?' said Mildred. ‘Well, I must say, you are the most handsome wizard I have ever seen and I have seen four of them.'

Valla blushed, which in his case meant turning even whiter.

‘In fact,' Mildred added, fluttering her eyelids, ‘one could say you are drop-dead gorgeous.'

Valla was speechless. He was in love. Here was a girl with so much sophistication that she even knew the drop-dead gorgeous joke. Here was a girl that he could take home to his parents, a girl he knew they would thoroughly approve of.

‘Tell me,' he said. He took Mildred's hand in his, then – realising that he was so deeply in love with her that he had no desire to eat it, despite it looking incredibly delicious – he gave it back to her. ‘Tell me. How did you die so young?'

Mildred hesitated, as if unsure what to say.

‘I had the plague and the ostrich pox
⁴⁶
and I was poisoned by a young man who I rejected and I got trampled by a runaway horse while crossing the street to the pharmacy to collect medicine for
my tuberculosis,' she said. ‘I suppose it was just my time to go.'

‘How romantic,' said Valla, rejecting the idea of nibbling on Mildred's ear in case he ended up eating all of her.

‘I have lain these past two centuries and more waiting for my true love to arrive,' said Mildred. ‘And here you are, my Prince Charming.'

As the moon sank over the horizon and the first rays of sunshine tip-toed over the mountain top behind them, Mildred Flambard dropped back into her grave and Valla slid her stone slab over her.
⁴⁷

‘Fear not, my darling,' Valla said as he slid the stone back the last few millimetres. ‘I am from a family of wizards and I am sure that you and I are bound together by destiny. My family has access to all the magic of the universe and I will work out a way to free you forever from your tomb of darkness.'

And if we can't,
Valla thought as he walked back to the hotel,
it's a very nice tomb of darkness with more than enough room for both of us. I'll just move in there.

When Valla arrived back at the hotel, the family barely recognised him. He was smiling. At least, that was what he said he was doing. If he smiled like that at a baby it would have nightmares.

‘You are sure that's what you're doing, aren't you?' said Mordonna.

‘I think so,' said Valla. ‘I've never smiled before.'

‘Well, if you are,' said Merlinmary, ‘that's your emo image done for.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Satanella. ‘I think he looks even more depressing.'

‘Well, I am not depressed,' said Valla. ‘I am in love and we are going to get married.'

He told them all about Mildred and then asked Winchflat if he had a machine or something that could bring her back to as near a state of being alive as possible.

‘Tricky,' said Winchflat, ‘Of course, there is a very simple solution, but it's not ideal.'

‘What's that?'

‘Well, if I'm not mistaken, this daylight-into-dust thing only works when the light lands on the corpse's head. I think anywhere else it's harmless. So the obvious thing would be for your girlfriend to wear a big paper bag on her head during the day.'

‘Yeah,' laughed Morbid, ‘like yours does.'

‘Are you sure about the daylight thing?' said Valla. ‘Sounds a bit risky.'

‘No, I'm not completely sure,' said Winchflat. ‘I think it works with some undead creatures, but not with others.'

‘I think it's too risky, darling,' said Mordonna. ‘I mean, it could all go horribly wrong and you could end up with a head in a bag and a pile of dust.'

‘OK,' said Winchflat. ‘I'll think of something else.'

‘Couldn't you turn her into a zombie, Mother?' asked Valla. ‘Or just clone her?'

‘Cloning could work,' said Winchflat. ‘We could take one of her cells and use the special photocopier at school to copy it until we had enough cells to make a whole Mildred Flambard.'