Floods 5 (8 page)

‘Are you sure this is the Sahara?' said Merlinmary, opening the wardrobe door a crack and peering out. ‘It's raining extremely hard and if you don't do something in the next 3.1 seconds a very big red double-decker London bus is going to hit us in about 3.2 seconds.'

Winchflat did something and muttered about stupid dyslexic keyboards.

‘Is that better?' he said when they stopped being a mass of molecules whizzing through space and time.

‘Well, the bus has gone,' said Merlinmary.

‘But it's still raining and we're still sitting in the middle of a road in London?' said Winchflat.

‘I think so, except there are horses now and everyone's wearing really old-fashioned clothes,' said Merlinmary. ‘Still, there's good news too.'

‘What?' said Winchflat, twisting knobs and pushing buttons.

‘It's just stopped raining.'

Winchflat finally realised what he'd been doing wrong.

‘I was using the co-ordinates I'd use if we were at home, not at school. I'll have to re-calculate,' he said.

‘Well, you'd better hurry up,' said Merlinmary, pulling the door shut. ‘There are three evil-looking villains approaching and I think they're highwaymen.'

‘You know, the nineteenth century would be a great place to hide,' said Morbid as a loud pounding began on the outside of the wardrobe.

Merlinmary clicked her fingers and there were three piercing screams, followed by silence. When
she opened the door again, there were three very well-toasted robbers lying on the ground.

‘Ooh, toasties,' said Satanella, sniffing the air. ‘I like toasties.'

‘That's odd,' said Winchflat. ‘The Zoomy thing's not designed to travel through time. That's the last time I buy a calculator made in Belgium.'

Winchflat finished his calculations, pressed the buttons, and they landed on Lord Clacton's doormat in the deserted desert village of Kalibarquorumire.

Lord Clacton was the image of an absent-minded professor. His buttons were in the wrong holes, he was wearing odd socks – on his hands – and he had an omelette in his shirt pocket. Like all true geniuses, he lived in another world, a magic place where normal people only go when they have a very high fever. The upside of this was that the sudden appearance of five strange-looking young wizards in a wardrobe on his doorstep didn't upset or frighten him at all.

‘Yes, absolutely, of course, quite so,' he said. ‘Winchflat Flood, I presume.'

‘Lord Clacton,' said Winchflat, and the two of them exchanged a strange handshake that was nothing like the secret Freemason's handshake, but exactly like the Secret-Planetary-Network-of-Genius-Nerds-Special-Handshake, only more mysterious.

‘Come, we have much to do,' said Lord Clacton. ‘The time machine is at an exciting stage of development. I take it that's why you are here.'

‘Well, dear friend,' said Winchflat, sounding more like a forty-five-year-old scientist than a fifteen-year-old wizard. ‘That's not why we came. Much as I would like nothing more than to get your invention working, we came here to hide. We need to lie low for a while.'

Lord Clacton, like most absent-minded boffins, took every word at its literal meaning. He lived in a little world of his own that few people, apart from Winchflat, could imagine, never mind visit. That, combined with his very formal well-mannered upbringing at Castle Clacton in England, meant that he was far too polite to ask
the Floods what they were hiding from.
³³

‘Well, you're in luck,' Lord Clacton said. ‘I believe this is the only house in the whole of the Sahara with a cellar, so if you all go down there and stretch out on the floor you will be lying lower than anyone else for thousands of miles.'

Winchflat didn't even try to begin to explain so, after a meal of cucumber sandwiches, scones and tea brought by a very, very old butler, the five Flood children went and lay down on the cellar floor.

‘Do you think his lordship would mind if I ate those spiders?' said Merlinmary, pointing up at the ceiling.

‘You can never tell with Clacton,' said Winchflat. ‘They could be part of some experiment, or not even spiders at all.'

‘So, is this time machine he's building real?' said Morbid. ‘Because if it is, I was wondering
if we could use it to go back to just before the dead professor appeared at school and wait by the graveyard gates and do something about it.'

‘The last I heard from Clacton was that it was working, but he had forgotten to get inside it before he sent it back in time, so now he doesn't know where it is,' said Winchflat.

‘Ah.'

‘But I like your idea, so maybe we should help his lordship recover the machine,' said Winchflat.

‘Wouldn't it be simpler to make another one?' Merlinmary suggested. ‘He must have drawn up some plans.'

‘I did indeed, old chap. Safely locked away, they are,' said Lord Clacton when they went upstairs to try to help him.

‘Well, there you are then, problem solved,' said Merlinmary.

‘Not really,' said Lord Clacton.

‘You've lost the key?'

‘No, I have it right here,' said his lordship. ‘I've lost the drawer the key fits into.'

‘It's part of the time machine, isn't it?' said Winchflat.

‘Yes.'

‘I've got an idea,' said Satanella. ‘Why don't we make a time machine and go back in time until just before his lordship sent his time machine away … Oh.'

‘Couldn't we just go back in your Zoomy Thing?' said Morbid.

‘Well, theoretically we could,' said Winchflat. ‘But we would need to know the exact date to go back to, otherwise we could end up completely lost.'

‘So what's the problem?' said Merlimary. ‘Just get his lordship to tell you what time he sent it to and go back just before that.'

Lord Clacton blushed and began fiddling with a cactus growing in a pot on the windowsill.

‘He can't tell the time,' Winchflat whispered to the others. ‘He's a brilliant genius, but totally useless about things that have numbers in them, like times tables and clocks.'

‘Gone? What do you mean, gone?' said the headmaster.

‘We were, umm, well, briefly distracted,' said Grusom. ‘And when we stopped being distracted the body had vanished.'

‘Maybe it just wandered off,' said the headmaster. ‘Have you checked the grounds?'

‘It was dead,' said Avid. ‘How could it wander off?'

‘My dear young lady,' said the headmaster, ‘you are forgetting that this is a wizard school – several of our students have been dead for years. In
fact, if a student fails their exams, they can re-do the whole year as a corpse so that when they get to the next year, they haven't got any older.'

Avid nodded, blushing slightly, partly at the idea that some of the things wandering around the school could be dead, partly due to the memory of writhing around on the floor in hysterics, partly because of where the magic beans that had fallen down her blouse had ended up,
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and partly from feeling stupid at losing an entire dead body.

‘Bodies don't just vanish,' continued the headmaster. ‘Have you checked with Elanora Bedlam? She didn't make it into soup, did she? She does love her Corpse and Onion Soup. Can't stand it myself. The onions give me wind, though I adore the gristle.'

Avid wondered which she would rather do, faint or throw up. Unable to decide, she did neither.

‘So I suppose, if you wanted to,' Grusom suggested, ‘seeing as how there is no dead body as evidence, you could actually sort of pretend that there had never been a murder here at all and we could just quietly leave and keep quiet about the whole thing.'

He was hoping the headmaster would like this plan, because he knew that if word ever got out that he and Avid had had a corpse vanish from right under their noses – though it was actually above their noses as they had been lying on the floor at the time – it would make them the laughing stock of every forensic science laboratory around the world.

‘Yes, that is one option,' said the headmaster, ‘but I think there are too many people here who know that's not the case. Sure, we're wizards and I could just cast a Forget-You-Ever-Saw-A-Dead-Professor-Spell over the whole valley, but some of my more wealthy students have been injected with the Fabergé Seriously-Expensive-Anti-Spell-Serum, so the spell wouldn't work on them – and, like lots of seriously wealthy children, they are nasty, snotty little troublemakers, just the sort to go selling a story to the papers. So I think we need to do Plan B.'

‘Which is?'

‘We will clone your dead professor.'

‘Human cloning is a myth,' said Grusom and Avid together.

‘Not if you're a wizard or a witch,' said the headmaster. ‘It's easy. Even our seven-year-olds can do it. Now I'm sure you've got some of those little plastic bags you people always seem to have containing little bits of nasty stuff you scraped off Professor Randolf Open-Graves. So you go off and fetch them while I send for Doctor Mordant, our genetic engineering and cloning teacher.'
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Doctor Mordant was not at his best. As usual, he had been doing genetic engineering experiments on himself. He had finally settled on two as the best number of heads and legs, though he was still deciding what sort of feet he wanted. At the moment he had one human foot and one really huge elephant's foot, which kept catching on the furniture and tripping him up. He was going to try mountain goat's feet next as he had read that they were very agile at climbing up and down almost
anything without falling off. On this particular day he had replaced all his fingers with cucumbers, which made it impossible for him to pick anything up, including his
Genetic Engineering Instruction Book
, which he needed to undo the spell.

‘I just need a bit of help here,' he said out of a third mouth somewhere inside his trousers. ‘Then I'll be right with you.'

Avid held up the book and turned the pages until he asked her to stop. He closed his eyes, muttered some silent secret words and his fingers and thumbs stopped being vegetables, though his ears appeared to have turned into two large ham sandwiches. More muttering and more secret words and his fingers changed from hairy goldfish back into normal fingers and his ears back into ears, though ones that would have looked better on a big rabbit.

‘Phew, that's better,' he said from the mouth in his left face. ‘Now how can I help you?'

The headmaster explained what had happened and Grusom handed Doctor Mordant a plastic bag containing some stuff he had retrieved from under the dead professor's fingernails.

‘OK, better stand back,' said Doctor Mordant, tipping the tiny grey speck onto the table. ‘These things can be unpredictable. Do you know exactly what this sample is?'

‘No,' said Avid, reading the label on the sample bag. ‘We haven't had time to complete our
analysis. It came from beneath the professor's right index finger.'

Doctor Mordant peered through his magnifying glass, consulted his book, and peered some more.

‘It doesn't look very nice,' he said. ‘If I wasn't such an authority on cloning – I mean, if I was looking at this sample with an untrained eye – I would say it was a bit of snot.'

‘But you are an expert,' said the headmaster, ‘so what would you say it was?'

Doctor Mordant looked again.

‘Well, it could be a
Big Brother
contestant's brain. They look very similar to a bit of snot or, as we cloning operatives like to call them, a bogey-wogey.'

His first guess was right. The dead fake professor's favourite hobby had been picking his nose. He had been something of an expert on snot and had actually kept a diary to demonstrate how snot tasted different depending on what time of day you collected it and what time of year it was.
Apparently spring snot tasted nicer than winter snot, which contained more salt.

As Doctor Mordant read the cloning spell out of his book, a gigantic snot appeared on the table. It looked like a bogey asteroid. They could see all the disgusting cavities full of green sticky stuff, with flaky bits of crust forming round the edges. They could even see, magnified a thousand times, the unspeakable seven-legged bacteria that live on snot, spending their entire lives up people's noses, except when they get sneezed out. And at almost a metre long there was a smell too – a smell that made the worst smell any of them had ever been exposed to before seem lovely by comparison.

This time Avid had no trouble deciding whether she'd rather faint or throw up. She did both. Grusom agreed and did the same.

‘Humans are pathetic, aren't they?' said the headmaster, though even he felt a little green.

‘I know,' said Doctor Mordant. ‘I mean, look at it. That's a nice shade of green on those little
bumps and I think the bacteria drowning in those slimy pools are quite cute.'

Scooping the tiny creatures up into a jam jar, he added, ‘Think I'll keep some. They'll make a really interesting science project for my year seven class.'

Then he reversed the spell, cleaned up the slime, resuscitated Grusom and Avid and tipped the second sample bag onto the table. The minute speck was a flake of skin, so this time they got what they wanted: an almost identical copy of the missing corpse.

Except that the Professor Randolf Open-Graves clone was not dead and, like the original, was not actually Professor Randolf Open-Graves from Belgium but Klaus von Klaus, the international bus ticket forger who had been hiding out on Inaccessible Island.

‘Vot am I doing here? Thank you, good morning, please,' he said, sitting up and looking round the room. ‘Zis is not Tristan da Cunha being, thank you, good afternoon.'

‘Are you Professor Open-Graves?' said the headmaster. ‘You sound more German than Belgian.'

‘Zat is because I am one hundred percent German being,' said Klaus von Klaus.

‘Have you ever been Belgian?' said Grusom. ‘How dare you suggest such a thing being?'
said Klaus von Klaus. ‘If you don't mind, good afternoon and good night.'

Then everyone accused Dr Mordant of being rubbish at cloning because he had obviously created the wrong person. Grusom suggested that maybe the professor had been standing next to Klaus von Klaus on a bus and somehow got some of his skin underneath his fingernails.

‘But that wouldn't explain how they look exactly the same,' said Avid. Breaking into a big happy smile, she got out her special FSI cotton bud and added, ‘I'll do a DNA test.'

‘I think it's my turn to do the DNA test,' said Grusom sulkily, but Avid had the swab under a microscope before he could even clean the magic bean juice off his cotton bud.

The DNA results showed that Klaus von Klaus and Professor Open-Graves were one and the same person. No one knew what to make of this news, least of all Klaus von Klaus.

At that moment the Hearse Whisperer returned from burying the body of the original
Klaus von Klaus outside his old cave on Inaccessible Island. She had taken the form of an eagle for her journey back, and on reaching the school she had changed into a sparrow. By an incredible coincidence, of the school's seven hundred or so windowsills, the one she chose to land on was the one with the headmaster, Grusom, Avid and the Klaus von Klaus clone inside.

The Hearse Whisperer was totally confused. She had just buried the dead fake professor yet there he was on the table. Not only that, he was alive. Before she could work out what was going on she took a step backwards – which is not a good idea when you are standing on a windowsill only one step wide ten stories above the ground – and fell into a drain before she had time to realise she was disguised as a sparrow and could actually fly.

This was good timing for the people in the room, because the Hearse Whisperer didn't hear the headmaster say sarcastically, ‘Do you think we should make some spare ones in case you lose this one too?'

They made three more Klaus von Klauses and locked them up in a cupboard in a state of suspended animation.

‘Just make sure Elanora Bedlam doesn't know they're there or we'll be eating Klaus von Klaus burgers for a week,' said the headmaster.

By the time the Hearse Whisperer had flown out of the drain, wasted five minutes turning a small boy into a bucket of carrots to make herself feel better and flown back up to the windowsill, the scene was the same as it had been five minutes ago: the first Klaus von Klaus clone was sitting on the table and everyone else was standing around looking confused.

The Hearse Whisperer clicked her fingers and everybody in the room fell into a deep sleep. Normally she would have killed them all in a very unpleasant yet colourful way, but she didn't want to draw attention to herself or do anything that might deflect suspicion away from the Flood children, wherever the little brats had got to.

Ten minutes later everyone woke up again,
including the first Klaus von Klaus clone, who was not so much sitting on a table in the headmaster's office at Quicklime's as being buried next to the original Klaus von Klaus far away on Inaccessible Island.