Floods 8 (10 page)

Now King Nerlin and Queen Mordonna were running things, the Queen Mother realised it was time to retire, but at 108 years old she still had a lot to offer and sitting round waiting to die while bits of her fell off, or talking to a blank wall and dribbling a lot, was not something she wanted to do.

‘Well, not for a while anyway,' she said. ‘I'll keep that to look forward to.'

‘Been there, done that,' she said, when people suggested things she might like to do.

The trouble was that people kept suggesting boring old lady things.

‘What about embroidery?' said Mordonna.

‘Or lawn bowls?' said Nerlin.

‘Never been there, never done that, never going to do that,' said the Queen Mother as she bid for a Turbo Microlight Personal Jet Transporter on eBay.

‘What about gardening?' Mildred Flambard-Flood suggested. ‘A lot of old people do that.'

‘Could do that,' said the Queen Mother as she bid for twenty-five sticks of dynamite on bombBay. ‘Nice bit of landscape gardening.'

The Queen Mother's husband, Vessel, the Duke Of That Other Place Across The Lake Whose Name I Can't Remember, was also fed up with life at the royal court because of all the time he wasted when he had to say his name or listen to other people saying it. So he went to the other place across the lake whose name King Nerlin couldn't remember to find out what it was called.

It was called Kevintown.

‘Maybe I'll just keep the long name after all,' he said.

‘Or,' the Queen Mother suggested, ‘we could get my son-in-law to change the name to one we both like.'

So Vessel, the Duke Of That Other Place Across The Lake Whose Name I Can't Remember, became the Duke Of Elvistown, which was more suitable than anyone realised because the hermit who lived in the cave behind the village had, in a former life, been a very famous rock and roll singer with that very name. He had secretly gone to the cave in 1977 and had been there ever since.

‘You know what we could do,' said the Duke Of Elvistown, ‘now Transylvania Waters is making contact with the outside world? We could start a bed and breakfast.'

‘Haven't been there. Haven't done that,' said the Queen Mother. ‘Great idea.'

Because Transylvania Waters is different from the rest of the world, so was the bed and breakfast. It was not so much a B&B as a B&B&B, which stood for Bed and Breakfast and Blood. If visitors were prepared to give a litre of blood, then they
could stay for free. If they wanted blood, then they had to pay.

A road was needed before visitors and things could be brought into Transylvania Waters, and Merlinmary was given the job of building the first one. Because of the incredibly high mountains all the way round the country the road would have to be in a tunnel. Normally a big road into a country has lots of lanes going in both directions, but Merlinmary decided to do things differently.

‘It's like this,' she said. ‘As we know from growing up among them, humans are strange beings.'

‘Can't argue with that,' said King Nerlin.

‘And whereas we know that Transylvania Waters is paradise and the most beautiful place on earth, humans might not see it like that,' Merlinmary continued. ‘Ridiculous, I know, but humans are not normal.'

‘Can't argue with that,' said Queen Mordonna.

‘So what we're going to do is make a single one-way tunnel in through the western mountains and a single one-way tunnel out through the eastern
mountains,' Merlinmary explained. ‘That way, the only way they can leave is to drive right across the country.'

‘Brilliant,' said the Queen Mother, ‘and they'll have to stay at our B&B&B, which is right in the middle.'

‘We'll build a pub next to it to make them feel at home,' said Merlinmary.

So very late at night they went to a sleepy old English village, stole a really old half-timbered pub called ‘The King's Arms' and transported it back to Transylvania Waters, where it was renamed ‘The Severed Arms'.

By an incredible bit of good luck and timing, the Duke Of Elvistown discovered an unknown talent
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for making beer and produced a range of fantastic beers that became world famous
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and brought huge numbers of thirsty tourists to Transylvania Waters. Not only did the beer taste
fantastic, but when people drank too much of it they turned into bright pink, very happy rabbits instead of the usual angry, falling over idiots. And when the bunnyness wore off they had no headache, just a memory of being very happy. This effect only happened in Transylvania Waters. In other countries they behaved like idiots who drink too much do everywhere: fighting, falling over a lot and singing awful songs really badly.

Boring tunnels through several miles of incredibly hard rock is something that even the most powerful spells cannot do. And thank goodness they can't, otherwise some loony wizard would have bored a hole right through the world and all the boiling hot lava in the middle would have burst out like hot jam from a doughnut and burnt everyone to death. There are, however, a few rare wizards who have special talents to do just that, and Merlinmary was one of them. As he/she had already shown before,
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Merlinmary could generate massive
amounts of electricity, and one of the things you can do with massive amounts of electricity is to power awesomely, terrifyingly, brilliantly powerful lasers. And if you can make a laser that is a thousand times more powerful than the sun, then you can bore through solid rock with it.

So Winchflat made Merlinmary a Great-Big-Laser-Hat, which Merlinmary put on her head and pointed at a mountain. As Merlinmary walked slowly forward the laser beam burnt into the rock and vaporised it. By moving her head around, Merlinmary could make the tunnel as wide and tall and she wanted. It had already been decided, very wisely, that absolutely no coaches or trucks would be allowed into Transylvania Waters, so Merlinmary kept the tunnels very narrow and full of tight bends so that only cars could travel down them.

There was also a special caravan and camper van filter at the entrance to the coming-in tunnel because, as everyone knows, caravans and camper vans are evil devices invented by the devil to cause traffic problems. There was also a bumper sticker
filter, which rejected any car with stickers on it, even if the stickers looked as if they were saying sensible things, because bumper stickers are even more evil than caravans. If a car towing a caravan that had bumper stickers on it tried to drive into Transylvania Waters, there was a big flash of light, a very loud rude noise and the car, the caravan and everyone inside it was instantly transported to a remote rubbish dump in Belgium that had no signs anywhere to tell people where they were.
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Even worse than a car and a caravan with bumper stickers is a car and a caravan with bumper stickers that have a
on them. The bumper sticker filter sends these ones into the middle of the busiest intersection of the busiest city in the world at the busiest time of day, then makes the car engine break down beyond repair, turns everyone in the car completely naked apart from a really disgusting cardigan with leather buttons that is way too small to hide all their rude bits, fills the car full of fleas
and piles of seven-week-old mouldy pizzas and even older dirty nappies, and covers the caravan in graffiti that insults the people of the country they have been transported to. Naturally, all the brochures advertising Transylvania Waters have warnings about caravans, cardigans and stickers, but it is amazing how many people don't take them seriously.

Merlinmary's tunnels were very windy
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because she hated straight lines and also because every time someone called her, she turned her head before switching off the laser. This meant the tunnel ended up with lots of side tunnels, some of which were dead ends and some of which actually bored through into existing cave systems. A lot of tourists spent so long lost in the tunnels that their holidays were over before they even arrived in Transylvania Waters. Then, of course, they had to drive right across the country to leave so they got back to work really late and quite often lost their jobs.

When a car did actually reach Transylvania Waters, they had to go through Immigration. If anyone coming in to the country had a moustache they had to pay a 25-splatzis Moustache Tax. As there was nowhere outside Transylvania Waters where you could change your money into splatzis no one could pay the tax, so the only option was to forfeit their moustache. Removal of the moustache was a free service provided by the Transylvania Waters Bureau Of Good Taste, though if you wanted it removed painlessly it cost 15 splatzis. The Cardigan Tax meant that cardigans were taxed at double the rate of moustaches. Every cloud has a silver lining, though, because cardigans make first-class compost, which meant all the gardens around the Immigration Office grew wonderful vegetables.

When a car left Transylvania Waters through the eastern mountains tunnel, it passed, quite unawares, through a magic gate that filled every visitor's brain with happy memories. It even filled the memory cards in their cameras with happy memories. This, of course, meant that more and
more people wanted to visit Transylvania Waters, even more than Belgium.

As the Floods settled down into their new lives in Transylvania Waters the outside world seemed further and further away. They may have opened the country to visitors, but as far as the Floods were concerned, none of them ever wanted to go outside again. The younger children, of course, were still at school, but because it was a school for witches and wizards and hidden away in a remote Patagonian valley, Quicklime College was more like an extension of Transylvania Waters than a part of the outside world.

Castle Twilight was so big that all the Floods
didn't just have a bedroom of their own, they each had a tower full of rooms. Of course, having seen the creepy, damp gloom the attics had to offer, Valla and Mildred un-bricked the old doorway up from the main Castle and moved up there. The rooms of peeling wallpaper and mildew-covered bones everywhere would be the perfect place to bring up their new baby.

‘Just think of all the wonderful things he will absorb crawling through that,' said Valla.

‘Oh yes, and all the centuries of history and germs he'll be able to lick from the walls,' said Mildred.

Winchflat decided to move down to the cellars. There were so many of them they could have swallowed the whole of Acacia Avenue fifteen times.

‘With all this,' he said to Maldegard, ‘we won't need any rooms upstairs with all their distracting daylight and sunshine.'

Maldegard agreed and, between them, they began to create the greatest network of experimental laboratories that had ever existed.

Naturally, Merlinmary chose to move into the tallest tower in the whole Castle.

‘It means,' she explained, ‘that I will be nearer to the sky and all that wonderful lightning.'

Transylvania Waters has more thunderstorms than anywhere else on earth. They happen almost every day and are so popular that TWTV began a
Fantastic Storms
series for people to watch when there wasn't a real storm going on. Lightning was to Merlinmary what chocolate is to humans, and to get as much of it as she could, she always slept with the window open and a giant lighting conductor in her mouth.
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Nerlin and Mordonna slept in the main tower
at the front of the Castle. It meant they could sit up in bed and look out over the entire town and out across the fields to Lake Tarnish in the distance. It also meant that anyone in the town could climb onto their roof with a pair of binoculars and see the King and Queen sitting up in bed and wave at them.

Morbid and Silent had two identical towers at opposite ends of the Castle. Most of the time they shared the same tower, one week in Morbid's and one week in Silent's, but from time to time they had arguments and then each one stayed in their own tower. Sometimes they wouldn't see each other for over a week – not because they were still arguing, but because they couldn't find each other again and kept forgetting who was who. This was especially a problem around full moon when Morbid became Silent and Silent became Morbid.

Betty painted the rooms in her tower pink and filled them up with lots of Hello Witchy dolls – which are like Hello Kitty only much, much better. But there was one thing that she missed and that
was her human friend, Ffiona. After the Hearse Whisperer had destroyed the Floods' home, Ffiona and the rest of the Hulbert family had gone back to Acacia Avenue while the Floods had fled disguised as hippies. Since that day, they had never seen or heard from each other.

Betty went to see her father for advice.

‘Father,' she said. ‘You remember the Hulberts?'

‘Yes, of course,' said King Nerlin. ‘They were our best human friends. Well, to be honest, they were our only human friends.'

‘Yes.'

‘In all the time we lived in Acacia Avenue, they were the only humans who accepted us for what we were and didn't criticise or complain about us,' said Nerlin. ‘I wonder how they're getting on.'

‘I was wondering that too,' said Betty, ‘and I was wondering if we could invite them to Transylvania Waters.'

‘What, for a holiday?' said Nerlin.

‘Or maybe even for ever,' said Betty.

‘Ah, well now,' said Nerlin, ‘I'm not sure if that would be allowed. They would be the only humans who had ever come to live here.'

Nerlin decided to ask his father for advice.

Since Merlin the 84th and his wife had been liberated from the drains, they had moved to a small idyllic cottage on the shores of Lake Tarnish. All they wanted was a nice peaceful life to see out their last two hundred years or so, a life full of all the things they had been deprived of trapped down in the gloom of the drains. So every morning they sat out in the garden and tried to get sunburnt. With the polluted skies above the country, this was taking a long time. Of course, their skin did turn a rich golden colour, but it wasn't sunburn. It was rust.

As he sat there, the old wizard performed Cleaning Spells and gradually the yellow clouds turned white. This was not popular with a lot of people who had grown up in the damp yellow gloom and didn't like the idea of sunshine and happy butterflies and skylarks singing high in the air.

‘Black crows and blood-sucking moths were good enough for our parents,' they said. ‘And they are good enough for us. Look what sunshine has done to the rest of the world.'

No one complained, however, as Lake Tarnish grew less polluted. Merlin knew where the tap in the museum had come from and once it was put back on the end of the deadly acid pipeline, the lake began to recover.

Betty adored her Grandpa Merlin and visited him almost every day. She would sit spellbound at his feet while he told her stories of the olden days when his great, great grandfather had guided King Arthur in ancient Britain. He was telling her about Camelot when Nerlin arrived.

‘Yes, Betty has already asked me about your human friends,' said Merlin.

‘And what do you think?' said Nerlin.

‘Well, friends are one of the greatest thing a person can have,' said the old wizard, ‘but you have to remember, the reason Transylvania Waters was created in the first place was to escape humans – in particular, the Knights Intolerant, who were determined to destroy us all.'
⁶¹

‘But the Hulberts aren't like that,' said Betty. ‘They were our best friends.'

‘I know,' said Merlin, ‘but they could have nasty relations who might want to come and visit them and who knows where that could end up.'

‘They don't have any relations at all,' said Betty, but she could see her grandfather wasn't sure.

‘Why don't you make Mr Hulbert the human ambassador to Transylvania Waters?' Betty suggested. ‘We could give them a special house, the Human Embassy, and they could live there.'

‘But then you'd have to tell all the humans about it and then they would all know Transylvania Waters is the land of witches and wizards and I'm not sure that would be such a great idea,' said Merlin. ‘We want life to stay nice and uncomplicated. We've already hidden all the valuable minerals and oil and stuff like that just in case one of our tourists is a mining expert. If they realised we could do magic, they'd have all sorts of evil people here trying to use us for awful military things. You know how aggressive and greedy humans can be.'

‘True,' Betty agreed.

But then King Nerlin, who had now become one hundred per cent wise, with every single bit of his brain as clever as a whole drawer full of very sharp knives, came up with a solution.

‘We will adopt the Hulberts,' he said. ‘We will make them Transylvania Waters citizens. That is, of course, assuming they want to come and live here.'

‘Brilliant,' said Betty.

Having a father who had become really clever almost overnight took some getting used to, but Betty decided she really liked it. What she and no one else realised was that the Not-Very-Bright Spell that Merlin had cast on Nerlin had actually made all his children not quite as clever as they could be, too. While Nerlin had been reduced to about forty per cent cleverness, his children had been reduced to ninety per cent. So the change wasn't very noticeable and the children put down their extra sharpness to being in Transylvania Waters.

‘What we'll do is invite them here for a holiday and then, if they like it, we'll let them stay,' said Nerlin.

There were still no telephones or internet in Transylvania Waters and no one was in any hurry to bring them in. They were sensible enough to realise
that the rest of the world didn't really have anything much to offer that Transylvanians wanted – apart from shoelaces and shiny red saucepans and maybe, though perhaps not, harmonicas. Betty wanted to go back to Acacia Avenue and fetch their friends, but Mordonna said no way because she was much too young to travel by herself. Everyone else was really busy with other stuff so Parsnip was ordered to volunteer for the job.

‘Snipsnip too tired,' he complained.

‘I'll make you a knight,' said Nerlin.

‘Sir Snipsnip … mmm, s'not bad,' said Parsnip. ‘Wait here.'

He flew out of the window and down to the town, where a group of crows were rummaging through the rubbish bins.

‘Hey girliebirds, King just make me Sir Snipsnip,' he said. ‘Who want be me girlfriend?'

‘Me,' said a one-eyed magpie with a bad limp.

Parsnip flew back to the castle.

‘Sir Snipsnip not get the girls,' he said.

‘How about Lord Parsnip?' said King Nerlin.

This produced three potential girlfriends and one of them had both eyes working.

‘Still not so great,' Parsnip reported.

‘OK, OK, Parsnip, Duke of Tarnish,' said Nerlin. ‘Duke's as high as I can go, but I'll throw in a bag of gourmet bird seed every Friday.'

‘Two bags.'

‘OK.'

That got Parsnip over twenty-five girlfriends. He knew in his heart that most of them only wanted him for his bird seed, but he could live with that.

‘Duke Snipsnip have bacon sammich then fly to Acacia Hublets,' he said.

Ffiona had been miserable since they had said goodbye to the Floods in Port Folio. The Hulberts had driven home to Acacia Avenue in total silence, each of them wondering if they would ever see their best friends again and thinking they probably wouldn't.

Before they had met the Floods, Ffiona's family had led very quiet, boring lives – and then everything had changed. Ffiona had stopped being bullied at school. Mr Hulbert had not only stopped being bullied at work but had ended up being in charge of the whole office, and Mrs Hulbert had learned that life could be a lot more exciting if you let your hair down from time to time, especially at weekends.

But now, with the Floods gone, the Hulberts felt they were slowly moving back to Dullsville, until that Saturday morning when there came a tap on Ffiona's bedroom window.

‘Is that you, Parsnip?' she said, her heart getting ready to jump for joy, but not actually
doing it in case it wasn't Parsnip, because all crows look very much alike and it might not have been. She opened the window.

‘Hello, Ffonier person, Snipsnip Duke of Tarnish bring big massage from Floods,' Parsnip said as he hopped into the room.