Floods 3 (12 page)

‘It would be good if we could get all the furniture sorted out first,' said Mordonna to Nerlin as they walked through the empty house, ‘because I'd like to have another baby very soon.'

As the whole family were witches and wizards, they didn't have to bother with all the usual shopping stuff.
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All they had to do was concentrate on what they wanted and do a few spells with Mordonna's wand.

The Queen, who was reduced to using her
second-best wand since the accident in Tristan da Cunha, was still too upset at losing Vessel to concentrate. After she filled the lounge room with crocodiles instead of comfy chairs, she was only allowed to get smaller household items like the kettle and toothbrushes.
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Remembering what the Sheman had said about having seven children, Nerlin was given the job of
adding more space to the house.

So as not to arouse suspicion with the neighbours when a whole lot of new rooms suddenly appeared, he hid three rooms in the attic and created some more underground, including lots of cellars where each member of the family could enjoy their own special hobbies or experiments to their heart's content. It was only when he had dug down so far that he could fry an egg on the floor using the heat at the centre of the earth that he decided it was time to stop.

About five minutes after the Floods finished
furnishing the house, the most incredible thunderstorm started. At first they thought the Hearse Whisperer had somehow managed to track them down, but it was just a coincidence.

Parsnip had always been a big fan of thunderstorms, especially lightning, so he decided to fly up to the tallest chimney and become a lightning conductor.

‘Ven Wessel back is, me be bird again,' he said and flew out into the rain to conduct the storm.

By the time Mordonna was ready to have her third baby, Parsnip had reached the fifth movement of his storm symphony and the thunder was exploding wonderfully through the black clouds. The crow raised his baton and massive bolts of lightning raced round and round number thirteen Acacia Avenue. Enough electricity to power the whole of New York for seventeen months shot through the bedroom window at the very moment the baby was born.

And in that instant all the lightning vanished.

And Mordonna got a huge shock.

Actually she got two huge shocks, and they were both from the baby. The first one was a huge electric shock and the second was a huge shock to her eyes. The baby was covered from head to foot in wiry hair. Even the palms of its hands and in between its toes were hairy and every hair was crackling with the lightning it had absorbed. In the darkness caused by a power cut, the baby's eyes sparkled like two light bulbs.

‘All that lightning,' said the Queen. ‘Is it dead?'

‘Far from it,' said Mordonna. ‘It's got a huge grin on its face.'

While the baby touched the brass bed with its fingers, making it glow and hover around the room, the Queen brought Mordonna a pair of heavy lead gloves so she could hold her new baby.

‘If it's a girl, let's call it Mary,' she said dreamily.

‘If it's a boy, we should name it after my most famous ancestor, Merlin,' Nerlin said.

They both peered closely at the baby, but couldn't find any clues to what it was. All their attempts to find out ended up with everyone getting an electric shock, even when they used a pair of rubber gloves and some barbecue tongs. In the end they decided that it didn't really matter.

‘Well, Merlinmary it is,' Mordonna said brightly. ‘I wonder what you feed an electric baby.'

‘Bat trees, bat trees,' Merlinmary said. ‘Me want bat trees.'

So they brought her bats but she just electrocuted them. They tried her with blood and everything else they had in the kitchen, but Merlinmary didn't like any of them.

‘If I remember rightly,' said the Queen, ‘I had a distant cousin three times removed – Binky Frankenstein – and she had the same problem. I think they fed her batteries.'

‘Bat trees!' Merlinmary repeated.

She stuck her fingers in the electric socket
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and all the lights in Acacia Avenue went out.

‘Maybe you should just use one finger next time,' Mordonna suggested.

Despite the late-night happy sounds of Valla sucking blood, Satanella yapping and Merlinmary buzzing quietly, the Queen couldn't settle down. She spent all night every night pacing up and down on the back verandah. If
you
did this for several nights, you would look dreadful. With the Queen it was difficult to see any difference.

‘Mother, you look like death warmed up,' Mordonna said. ‘Actually, no, you always look like that. Now you look like death gone cold. But you shouldn't give up hope. I'm sure you'll see Vessel again.'

‘That's easy for you to say, but together we're hundreds of years old already! How long do you
suggest I wait before giving up hope?'

‘Maybe we could send Parsnip to look for him,' Nerlin suggested.

‘If we do that it could alert the Hearse Whisperer to where we are,' said the Queen. ‘No, I've made a decision. I want to be buried in the back garden. If my sweetheart ever comes back, you can dig me up again.'

If you are a witch and you get buried in a coffin, it doesn't necessarily mean you're dead. It just means you've decided to stop being alive for a while, which is not the same thing. So Nerlin went down into his cellar and made the old lady a comfy coffin with a TV and an internit connection
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and a funnel for rat-tail soup – a special recipe from Tristan Da Cunha. Because she was one of those frantic little dogs that loves to dig, Satanella spent the next three days making a huge hole in the back garden.

When it was ready, Nerlin lowered the coffin
into place. The Queen put on a clean shroud, got a copy of the latest TV guide and a nice embroidered cushion saying ‘Death Is Not A Rehearsal', and climbed in.

Nerlin screwed down the lid, connected the TV to the power and plugged in the soup funnel. Then Satanella scraped all the earth back over the
coffin. Mordonna patted it down with a spade and planted a nice group of funeral lilies round the edge.

The Queen admitted to herself that she was too old to go gallivanting around any more and that long afternoons in the airless gloom of a comfy coffin watching old black and white movies on TV and being slowly eaten away by maggots would actually be rather nice.

‘If you hear anything about my beloved Vessel,' she shouted through the funnel, ‘just send me a fleamail over the nit.'

Over the next few weeks the Floods
settled in to their new home. The Hearse Whisperer searched backwards and forwards, up and down, sideways and in a wiggly spiral trying to find the family, but with no luck. Rather than admit they had eluded her, she convinced herself that they had left the country, so she left the country too. If only the Floods had known this, they could have sent Parsnip off to find Vessel and bring him back.

Leach, being a homing vulture, had no trouble finding them – although he had almost been persuaded to stay in Patagonia by a very attractive condor that had fluttered her throat at him and fed him dainty morsels of festering meat. The Flood family thought the sight of a huge ugly old bird flapping around Acacia Avenue might be too much for the locals, though, so Leach agreed to go and look for Vessel.

‘It's either that, or I could turn you into a budgie,' telepathed Mordonna.

‘Tough choice,' Leach telepathed back. ‘Fly through endless rain and storms and blizzards into the unknown or become a cute little blue thing
sitting in a cage eating disgusting cuttlefish and asking everyone who's a pretty boy then. I'll see you later.'

And he flew off in the totally wrong direction, which would probably become the right direction – eventually.

‘You know, Nerlin, my darling,' Mordonna said as they watched their three children racing
around the house, ‘the Sheman may have said seven children, but after one of the last two being turned into a dog because a prawn was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the other being struck by lightning, I think we might make the other four with a book of spells and a selection of common household ingredients.'

Winchflat Flood mostly created himself. Mordonna bought a packet of freeze-dried wizpoles
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by mail-order from Transylvania Waters, being careful to use a false name on the order form. Nerlin took one wizpole down into the cellars and put it into a tank of special hatching brew, which he made from an ancient recipe his grandmother had tattooed on the underneath of his tongue.

What should have happened then is that the wizpole should have slowly grown into a baby wizard by growing arms and legs and learning to
breathe air. What actually happened was that Nerlin dropped a minute scrap of bacon from a sandwich he'd been eating into the tank and it joined with the wizpole and slowly began to mutate.

Time passed and, as it did so, a tiny innocent worm tunnelled down from the back garden until it fell through a gap in the cellar roof and landed in the tank. By then Winchflat had grown his arms and legs and he swam over to the worm and swallowed it. At that very moment the brightest full moon of the century rose over Acacia Avenue and sent a tiny beam of light right down the tunnel the worm had made. As the light moved towards the cellar, it was magnified by minute specks of quartz in the earth, so that when it burst into the cellar it was as strong as a five-megawatt laser. It hit Winchflat right on the back of the head and transferred all its power into his brain.

I think, therefore I am,
Winchflat thought and immediately grew eyes, a nose, giant ears and extra fingers and toes.

I am a ladder,
he thought,
the Lord of the
Rungs,
and he climbed out of the tank.

Finally he thought,
I am Winchflat Flood, the Lord of the Things,
which was right, because Winchflat was to be the family genius who would invent and build many wonderful things such as the Solid Photocopier that could clone living beings, and the fantastic Seethebackofyourheadascope, which one day would turn him into a multi-millionaire.

But Winchflat's genius alone was not enough. Without the final incredible event in the series of coincidences that had created him, he would have starved to death, because tiny babies, even ones as incredibly brilliant as Winchflat turned out to be, cannot reach door handles. By a mega-double-incredible coincidence, Mordonna went down to that particular cellar to store a piece of washed-rind cheese that was so smelly
that even when it was buried in concrete inside a steel safe, it made your eyes water for a week.

‘I thought I was going to have another baby,' she said when she saw her newly created son. ‘Who's a clever boy then?'

‘I am, Mummy,' said Winchflat. He proceeded to recite his eighteen times table in seven hundred languages, none of which was Belgian.
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‘Well, four down, three to go,' said Nerlin when Mordonna arrived in the kitchen with their new baby.

‘I was thinking,' said Mordonna, ‘maybe we could have twins or even triplets and get the whole seven-baby prediction out of the way in one go.'

So baby Winchflat designed his first invention, using assorted plastic bottles, PVC pipes from the building site down the road, six toilet roll tubes, an experimental nuclear power plant, some chemicals, a set of Jamie Oliver saucepans and a dash of Worcestershire Sauce. They tried to construct the
machine in the cellar where Winchflat had been created, but the washed-rind cheese had mutated into a chartered accountant who wouldn't let them into the room because he still smelled like old mouldy socks and was very embarrassed.

‘Hold on,' said Winchflat. ‘If you want twins we need one more thing.'

‘What's that, my darling boy?' said Mordonna.

‘A mirror.'

So, in the end, the machine was built in the porcelain sink in the upstairs bathroom, underneath the vanity mirror. Winchflat put the finishing touches to his invention, then Nerlin lit the blue touchpaper and ran away.

There was a quiet explosion and when the smoke had cleared the sink was no longer full of toilet rolls and miscellaneous objects but was overflowing with twin baby boys. The two boys looked at each other and gurgled, one morbidly, the other silently. Mordonna and Nerlin knew exactly what to call them.

Later the whole family sat on the back
verandah, drinking warm blood slurpies as the ice-cold moon rose over the trees and illuminated the funeral lilies on Queen Scratchrot's grave.

‘One more,' said Mordonna.

‘Another slurpie, dearest?' said Nerlin.

‘No, darling. One more baby,' said Mordonna. ‘A nice sweet little girl.'

‘Just because the Sheman said we would have seven children doesn't mean we have to,' said Nerlin. ‘Everyone knows that Shemans are rubbish at numbers.'

‘That could mean we have fifteen children,' said Mordonna.

Nerlin went as white as the funeral lilies. The
colour even drained away from his blood slurpie. He was quiet for a while.

‘I suppose one more wouldn't hurt,' he said finally. ‘After all, we seem to have given your father's agents the slip. It's safe here.'

‘Exactly,' said Mordonna. ‘I want a pretty little girl and not one made in a jam jar or a cellar.'

‘OK, my darling.'

‘I think that then,' said Mordonna, ‘life would probably be perfect.'