Floods 8 (11 page)

‘Big, err, massage?' said Ffiona.

‘Yes, writ on this paper, big massage.'

‘Oh, you mean message,' said Ffiona.

‘Swot eye sed,' said Parsnip.

Ffiona took the piece of paper from the old bird and unfolded it:

‘Is that Parsnip?' said Mrs Hulbert when Ffiona walked into the kitchen with the old bird sitting on her shoulder.

‘Yes, and we've been invited to go and visit the Floods and Mr Flood is the King and Betty's a Princess so can we go?' said Ffiona.

‘Go where?' said Mr Hulbert, who had been outside fighting with the lawnmower, which was sulking in the garden shed and refusing to start.

‘I could so do with a holiday,' he said when Ffiona told him.

‘You speak yes to Duke Snipsnip and I fly back and send car,' said Parsnip.

‘Well, we need to make arrangements first,' said Mr Hulbert. ‘We have to stop the milk and the
papers and I have to put in for leave from work and then we need to get in touch with Ffiona's school.'

‘And I have to tell the bowls club I won't be playing for a couple of weeks,' Mrs Hulbert added, ‘and cancel my Pilates and my yoga and my embroidery and tell the clinic that baby Claude won't be going to play group and prune the roses and wash the car, and … and…'

Back in Transylvania Waters Winchflat had been watching all this on a minute webcam he'd hidden in Parsnip's feathers. He transmitted a message to the old bird.

‘Flinchwat say he dun magic, fixed all that stuff up,' said Parsnip.

There was the sound of doors and drawers opening upstairs and things bumping about.

‘What's that?' said Mr Hulbert in a panic. ‘Phone the police, we've got burglars!'

‘Not burglings,' said Parsnip. ‘Magic. Clothes packing into cases. All ready go holidays. Bye bye house.'

As he said it, four suitcases with everything
the family needed bumped downstairs and stood in a tidy line by the front door.

‘Changing Charlie Hublet nappy do please,' said Parsnip. ‘Stuff inside too powerful for magic and car be here soon.'

Mr and Mrs Hulbert were about to protest when they realised that the sort of people they had been before the Floods had come into their lives would have protested and that since their friends had gone they had been slowly slipping back into that old, lifeless life.

‘Err, OK everyone, let's go outside and wait for the car,' said Mr Hulbert, feeling that little streak of rebellion that Nerlin had given him begin to wake up again.

Ruby and Rosie, the two little dogs that Mordonna had rescued when they had been on holiday in Port Folio, but had to leave with the Hulberts when they had been forced to flee, ran round and round chasing their tails in excitement. Then they tried to chase Parsnip's tail, which sent him squawking up into a tree.

‘Snipsnip go get spell, turn yapdogs into sausage,' he called down.

Ffiona tied Ruby and Rosie to the suitcases to keep them quiet.

‘I better check the back door's locked and I've turned off the gas,' was what Mrs Hulbert nearly said, but she just slammed the door behind her and followed the family down the garden path, feeling 3.2 kilos lighter than she had when she'd got up that morning.

Two minutes later an old hippy minibus pulled up outside.

‘Excuse me,' said Mr Hulbert, ‘could you park a bit further down the road? Only we're expecting a car.'

‘No,' said Winchflat, taking off his chauffeur's hat and grinning, which made all the birds fly away, ‘you're expecting us!'

Betty jumped out of the van and threw her arms round Ffiona.

‘See, I told you we'd see each other again,' she said.

‘I know,' said Ffiona through her happy tears, ‘but I wasn't sure.'

‘Hey, I'm a witch.' Betty laughed. ‘It was bound to happen.'

They packed the cases into the van, and all climbed in.

‘Just a minute,' said Mrs Hulbert.

She walked across the road. Ultra-boring trendy greenies had just moved in and were driving everyone crazy about recycling every last thing, including the little bits of sleep in the corners of your eyes, which apparently made excellent stuffing for pincushions to send to refugees who had lost their own pincushions in terrible disasters. She dumped Claude's dirty nappy on the bonnet of their eco-electric car.

‘Recycle that, hippies,' she said and they all drove off.

‘Seatbelts on, everyone,' said Winchflat. ‘I've made a few adjustments.'

The old van didn't so much lift into the air, soar over the town, cross several countries, climb
over the mountain tops and come to rest in front of Castle Twilight, as de-materialise and re-materialise in front of Castle Twilight three-tenths of a second later, just as Mr Hulbert was about to say that he couldn't find the end of his seatbelt.

The whole Flood family was lined up to greet them.

‘Have you had breakfast?' said Mordonna as she walked into the Castle with her arm round Mrs Hulbert's shoulder.

‘Nice house,' said Ffiona as she followed Betty over the drawbridge into the castle courtyard.

‘Bit better than thirteen Acacia Avenue, isn't it?' Betty agreed.

‘You wait until you see the shed I've got now,' Nerlin said to Mr Hulbert. ‘Gadgets and tools that humans couldn't even imagine.'

Before he had met Nerlin, Mr Hulbert had no interest in sheds and all the wonderful things they might contain. He thought the most exciting gadget you could get was a ballpoint pen with a nice shiny chrome cap. He had a collection of more
than seventeen ballpoint pens, of which he was very proud.

However, since Nerlin had shown him his shed in Acacia Avenue, Mr Hulbert had broadened his horizons. He now had six screwdrivers, an electric staple gun, a cordless drill, a tape measure and a box of assorted screws. He had always planned on finding out what you used these toys for, but never quite got round to it. At the time it had been enough just to go and buy these gadgets and enjoy the thrill of taking them out of their boxes and holding them before putting them in a special cardboard box in his garage. When he had been feeling particularly
ambitious, Mr Hulbert had thought about putting a shed up at the end of the garden and had even got as far as getting three shed catalogues.

One of the first things Nerlin had done when he had become King was to put up his own shed at the back of Castle Twilight. It was a beauty, big enough to contain one of every shed in Mr Hulbert's three catalogues and still have room for a ride-on goat groomer. And because everyone had been so happy to see
Nerlin on the throne, once they heard he had built a shed – proving that he was not at all stuck-up like most kings, but actually one of the lads – people turned up every day with wonderful tools and gadgets to give him.

‘I want you to think of this shed as your own,' said Nerlin to Mr Hulbert. ‘Any time you feel like tinkering with something or want to chill out in one of the saggy old armchairs just come and help yourself.'

Mr Hulbert was overwhelmed at the incredible array of tools and toys. There were things that simply didn't exist outside of Transylvania Waters – not just PlayStation 6, 7 and 8, but wonderful things like an electric dragon polisher, a machine that could knit waistcoats out of custard, witches' brew varnish and a turbo wand that could perform three spells at the same time. Nerlin's shed promised hours and hours of endless fun and discovery, two things there had never been enough of in the normal Hulbert lifestyle.

Satanella and baby Claude Hulbert greeted
each other like old friends, which they were. Satanella wagged her tail. Claude tried to wag his, but just wet his nappy in excitement. Ruby and Rosie were over the moon to see Satanella again too.

And of course Morbid and Silent began mooning and swooning over Ffiona again and arguing which one of them would marry her when they were old enough.

In no time at all, it was as if the old friends had never been apart. The Hulberts thought they would stay in Transylvania Waters for two weeks' holiday, but the two weeks became three. The three weeks became four and every time Mr or Mrs Hulbert thought they should say something about going home, their hearts got the better of their brains and they said nothing.

Now the Floods were back where they belonged in the land of witches and wizards it was decided that Betty should go to school with her brothers and sisters at Quicklime College in Patagonia. Of course, there were other schools in Transylvania Waters. After all, not everyone wanted
to send their children to a wizard school. Mr and Mrs Hulbert were not at all sure about Ffiona going to Quicklime's with Betty – and Quicklime's was definitely extremely uncertain about Ffiona, a human, coming to their school.

‘But you brought the Hulberts here because they are your friends and you missed them,' said Betty.

‘True,' said Mordonna.

‘Well, Ffiona is my friend so I want her to come to school with me every day.'

They had to call an Extraordinary Special Meeting at the school. Ffiona Hulbert would be the first human student ever and even if her best friend Betty Flood was a princess, it was still a big and potentially dangerous decision to let her in. Of course, King Nerlin of Transylvania Waters donating a Werefrog Tank to the science lab helped, and the fact that Winchflat was the cleverest student the school had ever had was also good, but it was Betty's arguments at the meeting that finally won everyone over.

‘I'm sure you will all agree that humans are probably the weirdest life form on this planet,' she said.

Everyone did agree.

‘And very often, we just can't believe how stupid and evil they can be, can we?'

They couldn't.

‘If fact, I'm sure everyone here has, at least once, come across or heard of something humans have done that was so ridiculous they simply could not believe it at all?'

They had.

‘Well, just think how wonderfully useful it would be to have a human here among us who could help us sort out the myth from the reality.'

Everyone thought.

Then they thought some more and agreed that Betty was right.

So Ffiona Hulbert went to Quicklime College not just as a student, but also as a teacher. Once a week she gave a class where she tried to explain why humans did some of the things they
do that quite often not only made no sense at all, but actually threatened their very existence.

Some days even baby Claude Hulbert went to school, where he learned potty training and how to stay upright and how frogs are your friends, not your dinner.

Mrs Hulbert started teaching Pilates because no one in Transylvania Waters had ever heard of it before. Most people thought it was a diet where you ate a lot of pies and drank a lot of lattés. Wizards and witches were not into healthy exercise. They realised that exercise was very, very, very, very boring, even if you wear an iPod. If a witch thought she was getting a bit overweight she just did a Slimming Spell, and wizards all had extremely toned muscles because they did the Micro-Flexing-While-I-Am-Asleep-Keep-Fit-Routine. But Pilates wasn't like proper exercise and became very fashionable, especially when Mordonna started doing it.

Mr Hulbert had all the skills that Nerlin didn't have and didn't want, like adding things
up and then multiplying them by ten and writing them down in books.

‘They're called accounts,' Mr Hulbert, ‘and they're actually quite exciting.'

‘In that case, on no account would I want to take any of them away from you,' said Nerlin.

So it was that Mr Hulbert became the Chancellor of Transylvania Waters. Nerlin wondered if people would object to a human having the job, but since every single person fell asleep whenever they tried to add more than three numbers together, they were all only too happy for Mr Hulbert to have the job. And, of course, being the Chancellor, which is like the top accountant, of an entire country certainly beat being the accountant in a company that made hinges for toilet seats, which is what Mr Hulbert had been doing before.

‘I suppose we'd better go back to Acacia Avenue and sell the house and quit my job and all that sort of stuff,' said Mr Hulbert.

‘No problem,' said Nerlin. ‘All sorted. You got
a big redundancy payout from the International Toilet Seat Hinge Company because by an amazing coincidence the owner wanted to give your job to his son.'

‘I didn't know the boss even had a son,' said Mr Hulbert.