Floods 9 (16 page)

Nor was the room deserted.

Aubergine Wealth was dumbfounded. His family had created their secret route in and out of Castle Twilight, the hidden gate in the outer wall, the secret stone into the castle itself with the spiral staircase leading up into the castle attics and then a long corridor to the secret tower, and in all that time they had never shared the secret with anyone outside
their family. The Wealths had used the route and the hidden sanctuary for generations. Whenever there had been any financial hanky-panky in Transylvania Waters, a Wealth had usually been involved, and their hideaway right in the heart of the castle had saved their skin on quite a few occasions. He couldn't speak for any of his relations, but Aubergine Wealth hadn't been up to their sanctuary for a long time, certainly not since the
Floods had reclaimed the throne.

The person who was sitting in the red armchair in the middle of the room was not one of his relations.

‘I thought you'd come here, Auby One,' said Mordonna, using her childhood nickname for him and also making a really bad
Star Wars
pun.
⁶⁷

Aubergine was speechless.

‘Aren't you going to introduce me to your wife?' Mordonna continued as Aubergine struggled for words.

Aubergine Wealth and Mordonna had known each other since childhood. Because of their incredible skill in being very rich, the Wealth family – who gave their name to the state of being very rich – had been one of the few old Transylvania Waters families that Mordonna's evil father had not persecuted. In fact, they had thrived under his rule, a rule that had tended to overlook a lot of fairly illegal things that were now being dealt with by King Nerlin Flood and his counsellors.

‘Are you going to turn us in?' said Aubergine.

‘Turn you in? Turn you in to what?' Mordonna laughed. ‘No, no, no old friend, but I am going to put you out of your misery.'

‘What misery?' said Aubergine nervously. ‘In the past few months, I've made several billion dollars and fallen in love and got married. The first thing I took for granted, of course. Making fortunes is my natural talent. It's genetic, all my ancestors did it. The second thing was totally unexpected and more wonderful that I could have ever imagined.'

‘More wonderful than the billions?' said Mordonna.

‘Yes,' said Aubergine without a second thought.

Oh bugger,
was his second thought when he realised that although he would have said the right thing in his wife's eyes, and probably in Mordonna's too, it might not have been strictly true.

‘Did you really think you could outwit all of us?' Mordonna began. ‘I know you were very clever, the way you kept throwing my dear Winchflat off
the scent, but it was all irrelevant.'

‘How?'

‘We have known each other since we were children, haven't we?' said Mordonna.

Aubergine nodded and began to look worried.

Mordonna had spent her childhood locked away in Castle Twilight. Her father had kept her a virtual prisoner, imprisoned in a tiny castle with a mere two hundred and seventy-six rooms and a minute seventy-three-acre garden to play in. Her only friends had been the castle rats and a caterpillar called Brian, who had changed into a butterfly and deserted her, and the young Aubergine Wealth who, unknown to the king, had befriended the lonely princess.

‘So I think you'll agree that we know each other pretty well, don't we?'

Aubergine nodded again and looked worried again and again and then some more.

‘In fact, I'd say I probably know you better than you know yourself,' said Mordonna. ‘Being as how I know lots of stuff about emotions and feelings and you
know more about money type things.'

Aubergine stopped nodding. He just stood staring at his feet while Chrysanthemum held his hand and took over the looking nervous bit.

‘What I mean,' Mordonna explained, ‘is that for all of Winchflat's wonderful devices and all your clever subterfuges I knew all along that you would eventually end up here.'

‘But even I didn't know that,' said Aubergine. ‘I mean, I hadn't planned to. We just sort of made our escape up as we went along.'

‘No you didn't,' said Mordonna. ‘You were always going to end up in your family's secret hideaway. I was extremely surprised when you suddenly fell in love and got a wife. That really threw me. I had always assumed that if you ever did get married it would be to a very big cash register. I did have a small Plan B on hand in case you didn't come here, but thankfully it wasn't needed.'

Aubergine knew better than to ask Mordonna what her Plan B was. He had painful childhood memories of being confined in very small electrically
powered boxes with very sharp bits when he had refused to share his lollies with her.

‘So what are you going to do?' Aubergine asked. ‘Do we have to give all the money back?'

‘Oh yes,' said Mordonna, ‘that and more.'

‘More? How much more?'

‘Well, you know the money you've hidden away that absolutely no one knows about?' Mordonna began.

Aubergine's mouth hung open as his thoughts raced round the world visiting all the secret stashes he had made over the years. As he realised later, this was about the worst thing he could have done, because Mordonna was one of the greatest mind readers of all time. Not only could she read his mind as it went from cache to cache, she could note them down in her head and locate them all to within five centimetres with her built-in GPS.

‘Well, I say no one knows about it.' Mordonna smiled. ‘Guess what?'

Aubergine Wealth collapsed onto a chair and buried his head in his hands.

Mordonna pressed a button and the middle of the room gently floated down into the room below, where Winchflat was making a few final adjustments to his massive Toilet-Roll-Magnet-With-Kitchen-Roll-And-Tissue-Attachments-Machine which was now an Every-Single-Cent-Aubergine-Wealth-Has-Magnet.

‘Would you like to press the button?' Mordonna
asked Aubergine. ‘Kind of say a personal goodbye?'

Aubergine did a goldfish impersonation, which meant he stood there with his mouth opening and closing and no sound coming out, just a few bubbles.

Chrysanthemum, who hadn't married him for his money, but had fallen deeply in love with it very soon after, shrugged her shoulders.

Oh well,
she thought,
easy come, easy go.

Not my lovely husband
, she added in case anyone was reading her mind – which of course Mordonna was.
I just mean the money
.

Then something rather wonderful and touchy-feely and all hippyish happened. Mordonna, one of the world's most powerful witches, clicked her fingers and Aubergine Wealth was overcome with a powerful desire for a Tofu Burger with Bean Sprouts and Homeopathic Mayonnaise. He yearned to have flowers in his hair and move to the country and float over fields of buttercups eating strawberries covered in carob chocolate substitute. Chrysanthemum's recent conversion to the Wonderful World of Wealth faded away and she was re-overwhelmed by
a love of pink things and soft faux-fur cuddliness. She could see the two of them growing broccoli and radishes together in a little cottage by a beautiful lake while a large number of once sad, lost and lonely puppies scampered playfully in the soft grass biting the heads off tiny lizards, but without the lizard bit.

Chrysanthemum, who never went anywhere without a bunch of flowers, wove them into her husband's hair and, holding hands, they pressed the button together.

All over the world Aubergine's soon-to-beex-fortune began to move.
⁶⁸
The three hundred cardboard boxes under Aubergine's bed emptied. So did the enormous sock inside the plastic bag under the rock on Inaccessible Island that was guarded by a flock of really bad-tempered Rockhopper Penguins who spent all day hopping on and off the rock and spitting at anyone who ever went near it – which
no one did so wasting all their spit made them even more bad-tempered. The rock actually rolled down the beach into the sea, which made the Rockhoppers really, really angry because they didn't have a rock to hop onto anymore.

‘And hopping on tiny seashells just doesn't do it,' said the chief penguin.

Relieved of its contents, the massive wallet that that had been sinking into the lawn behind Aubergine's house lay there in the rain feeling that its life had suddenly lost all meaning. Not only had all the money it had been holding gone, but so had the credit cards and even the ten-per-cent-off seniors card for the Zurich Cash'n'Carry. All that was left was a photograph of Aubergine's tortoise, Bullion, and that had been chewed by ants.

All the wallpaper disappeared from the walls of Aubergine's house and six Swiss banks filed for bankruptcy. Every last cent everywhere, even the silver threepenny bits that Aubergine's mother had always put in the Christmas pudding each year, had gone from their tin in the larder, and all the
seventeen billion dollars that Aubergine had coaxed away from the population of New York was quietly returned to its previous owners.
⁶⁹

Aubergine was penniless.
⁷⁰

And he had never felt happier.

Mordonna did the old Cinderella trick and turned a pumpkin into a little cottage on the shore of Lake Tarnish. There were roses round the door, organic broccoli growing in the back garden, six chickens who hated broccoli, an assortment of lost, lonely puppies who had been treated with the famous Transylvania Waters Stay A Little Puppy Forever spell and a book on how to teach yourself the banjo. This was very useful as Aubergine was suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to play hill-billy music. There were no books on how to teach yourself guitar
because Chrysanthemum already knew. There was also a nursery and two prams because Mordonna knew things that Aubergine and his wife didn't.

The husband and wife moved into their cottage and lived happily ever after apart from a splinter Aubergine got in his big toe two years later.

⁶³
The back of his other hand was tattooed with a map showing all the public toilets in Transylvania Waters. There was only one, so it was a very small map. He had maps and diagrams tattooed behind both knees and the soles of his feet were also tattooed: the left with a selection of Transylvania Waters's favourite insects and the right with an index to remind him which tattoo was where on his body, including the one with the security codes to his safety deposit boxes, which were on a very secret part of his body.

⁶⁴
Who may or may not be real.

⁶⁵
The Scarlet Vampire Butterfly is a strange and wonderful creature. First of all, it is the only butterfly that lives on blood, and second, it is the only creature that people queue up to get bitten by, because in exchange for a tiny drop of blood the butterfly injects them with an equal amount of its own dribble, which contains a chemical that turns them into a floaty happy hippy for the rest of the day. Some people actually keep a Scarlet Vampire Butterfly as a pet and have a little bite before they get up each morning. This, of course, is completely different from the Purple Vampire Butterfly, which makes you feel really, really Belgian for the rest of the day. If you are already Belgian then it makes you feel Welsh. If you are at all colourblind you are advised to avoid the forests of Transylvania Waters where these insects live.

⁶⁶
So did my editor.

⁶⁷
Which as we all know is not possible because ALL puns are good puns.

⁶⁸
Apart from the radioactive bit buried in the heart of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Winchflat had included a Dangerous Filter in the magnet so that stayed where it was.

⁶⁹
Apart from $12,465,977.25 that had belonged to a really bad-tempered old lady called Chlorine VanderVelde Rooschild who was so mean she even made her illegal immigrant slave servants recycle their own dinners. (Don't ask and don't think about it – you will just feel nauseated.)