Pure Dead Frozen (24 page)

“Ishn't Nieve a girl'sh name?”

“God, Titus. Say it, don't spray it. Stop stuffing food down your neck for just one millisecond while you speak, would you?”

“You heard me.”

“Does it really matter what name they give him? He'll always be the Squirt as far as I'm concerned.”

“God, Pan, that's
gross
. Not while I'm eating, if you please. Talking of which, d'you think anyone'll mind me sampling the buffet before the guests arrive? Saves me having to queue later on, huh? Wow. This stuff is
sensational
. Yum. What d'you think it is? This dip thing? I could eat that entire bowl myself. Come to think of it, I nearly have. Mmmmhmmm.”

“Dad's
bagna cauda
?” Pandora waited until Titus had his mouth crammed full before saying, “Uh…anchovies, mainly. Why d'you ask?”

         

“Pass me the towel, dear, would you?”

Damp obediently dragged a fluffy white towel off the radiator and delivered it to Mrs. McLachlan. She was waiting patiently to see how scratchy cardigans would go down with the new baby, waiting to see if Nieve's lungs were half as good as she suspected. Mrs. McLachlan scooped Nieve out of the bath and was about to swaddle him in the towel when Damp saw something surprising.

“What's the matter, pet?” Mrs. McLachlan peered at Damp, then turned back to the baby. “Och, he's just a wee boy, pet. They all have those. Not like wee girls at all.”

Damp's eyes grew wide, but she decided not to correct Mrs. McLachlan's assumption that she'd never seen Nieve undiapered.
That
wasn't even remotely interesting. Heaving a deep sigh, she wondered if she was the only one to notice that the baby hadn't entirely lost his magical covering of swansdown after the Sevens Wan enchantment wore off. As if snowflakes had settled like a mantle round his shoulders, baby Nieve was lightly dusted with downy feathers, giving him the appearance of a small angel recently fallen to Earth.

His navy blue eyes met hers, and Damp placed a finger across her lips as if to let her baby brother know that, for the time being at least, his secret was safe with her.

         

“Oh, come
on
. You don't believe in all that stuff, do you?” Receiving no answer to this, Titus rolled his eyes and slumped facedown on the rug. “Come off it, Pan. Act like a rational being for once. They're dice. Lumps of inert plastic. Much as I hate to be the one to break it to you, dice are immune to a woman's charms. You can lavish kisses upon their many dear little plastic faces until Hell freezes over and angels land in Argyll, but all to no avail. Read my lips. Kissing the dice isn't going to make any difference to how they fall.”

Pandora ignored this completely, rolling the dice back and forth between her hands while concentrating very hard on exactly how much she desperately needed to win. If she'd remembered correctly, there were twenty-eight thousand, nine hundred and forty-six good reasons for why she had to throw a double six right now.

One last kiss for luck, then.

“Did you hear that?” Tock paused, halfway through a mouthful of water lily sandwich.

“What? The shrieking of a thwarted man-child?” Tarantella's mouthparts curved upward with delight. “About time, too. Let's hope his sister does the decent thing and eats him up immediately.”

         

The roar of outrage came from one of the windows on the first floor, although whether it was made by Titus or Pandora was impossible to tell; under duress, Titus's voice was still indistinguishable from that of his sister. A listener standing on the rose quartz drive outside StregaSchloss might also have made out the murmur of many voices whose owners had raised crystal flutes of
prosecco
to welcome Baby Nieve, the newest Strega-Borgia, into their company.

         

Far, far harder to hear was the muted chink of pewter goblets, one against the other, as, in a firelit room, the ancestors drank a toast in celebration of their oldest and most elusive member, home at long last.

         

But only the keenest ears of all could hear the feathery hush of snow falling, flake upon flake, all around, for some sounds are most easily and clearly heard in the realm of our imaginations: we hear them in the waiting, listening hush between the dream and the awakening; in the indrawn breath of a new day; in the quiet beating of our own private hearts.

Afterword: The White Paternoster

D
amp's spell to protect her family is, no doubt, yawningly familiar to a modern reader who might unwittingly dismiss it as a mere nursery rhyme, a vaguely interesting but forgettable relic that they had thought to put behind them, alongside the indignities of toilet training and other dimly remembered horrors of early childhood. However, it might interest a reader to know that the actual rhyme is centuries old.

         

When Damp invoked Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, she too would have been blissfully unaware that she was tapping into an ancient and powerful magical tradition, older than even Strega-Nonna herself. Damp's rhyme was used across medieval Europe as a common prayer—the named pairs of angels invited to take up their positions round a child's bed were expected to act as a form of verbal armor-cladding to ward off evil. These kinds of common prayers were known as Lorica, derived from the Latin word
lorica,
which means “armored breastplate.” This rhyme in particular was also known as the White Paternoster—
white
symbolizing its usage by ordinary people for good purposes, as opposed to a Black Paternoster, which was undoubtedly used by ordinary demons for evil purposes and most certainly hissed over the heads of the demon babies in the nurseries of Hades.

In the unlikely event that you've managed to live your whole life until now without ever clapping eyes on Damp's spell, here it is for your protection too.

         

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,

Bless the bed that I lie on.

Four angels to my bed,

Two to bottom, two to head.

Two to hear me when I pray.

Two to bear my soul away.

Gliossary

B
LAG
: To acquire something with the aid of much wheedling, begging, and making false promises. The blagger has no intention of repaying the favor. The blaggee has no idea of this, due to the blagger's skill at blagging. Not to be confused with borrowing, but, it has to be said, not a million miles distant from stealing.

         

B
UNG
: This is something akin to a bribe that is bunged your way in return for services rendered or to ensure your tactful silence. Unsurprisingly, a
BUNG
is another name for a cork or stopper, or something that shuts something else up. See also
COCK-A-HOOP
.

         

C
LUEDON'T
: This is a board game that bears a faint resemblance to the hugely successful Cluedo (U.K.) and Clue (U.S.). Unlike these two commercially produced games, C
LUEDON'T
was made for the Strega-Borgia family by a grateful houseguest with, it has to be said, a particularly gruesome sense of humor. The game of C
LUEDON'T
differs from the original in many ways, but in the interests of not having a Gliossary that ends up being thicker than the text it is attempting to Gliossarize, we need only concern ourselves here with the differences between the brutally elegant murder weapons of Clue (the rope, wrench, candlestick, etc.) and the upstart C
LUEDON'T
's assortment of raggle-taggle death-dealing artifacts.

So, inside the C
LUEDON'T
box, you might find:

The Dodgy Hair Dryer: One imagines the houseguest was poking fun at StregaSchloss's antique and dangerous electrical wiring by creating here a murder weapon that electrocutes its victim.

The Flask of Botulinum Toxin: Again, this is the playful houseguest referring to the strong possibility of being poisoned by dining on badly canned food while a guest at StregaSchloss.

The Concrete Overshoes: With these murder weapons, a player of C
LUEDON'T
is reminded of the Strega-Borgias' connection to the Italian Mafia. Victims are weighted down with concrete blocks and dropped into canals, oceans, and lakes, where they sink to the bottom, never to appear again.

The Box Jellyfish: Imagine a transparent blob of maritime menace infamously capable of killing its victims with just one sting. In C
LUEDON'T
, players can float the Box Jellyfish invisibly in water in the bathtub, kitchen sink, or even, memorably, inside the water that is always present in domestic toilets.

The Headphones of Doom: When placed over a victim's ears, these appear to be normal audio accessories until the victim's music of choice reaches a crescendo. No doubt the same houseguest who designed the entire C
LUEDON'T
game must have grown weary of the loud
tss tsss tss
coming from Titus's head, and imagined headphones with spring-loaded spikes hidden deep inside each cup.
Tss tsss tss-AUGHHHHHH!

The Fatal Fishbone: I have encountered this thing's closest relative, the Nearly Fatal Fishbone. Over here in Scotland, we sometimes consume a smoked fish known as a kipper for breakfast. This is a dish for the very brave or the somewhat suicidal due to the diner having to be very careful not to inhale one of the millions of tiny, hairy fishbones that hide inside the kipper's exquisite flesh. Breakfast
not
being a time of day when I am either awake or in possession of fully functioning eyesight, I have unwittingly eaten forkfuls of Nearly Fatal Fishbones and only just narrowly escaped death. My fellow diners at these near-death breakfasts have been traumatized for life at the sight of me gagging, choking, turning blue, clawing at my throat, crashing backward off my seat, and thrashing on the floor to the accompaniment of noises more commonly associated with those of an espresso machine.
Bon appétit!
More kippers, anyone?

         

C
OCK-A-HOOP
: Picture the scene. Back in the Middle Ages, the highlight of a weekend's entertainment could be found by partying in a drafty castle. Deer and swans were roasted on an open fire, the contents of huge wooden beer barrels were broached, and vast quantities of food and liquor were consumed. In order to keep the beer flowing swiftly, someone would remove the stopper from the beer barrel and allow the beer to flood forth. This stopper was known as a cock. No, I don't know why either. Please don't interrupt. The cock would be placed on top of one of the large metal hoops encircling the beer barrel as a signal to everyone that it was time to get down to some serious beer drinking. Hence,
COCK-A-HOOP
.
That
was the historical part. The meaning of the phrase is “full of joy, jubilant and rejoicing,” which, I guess, is what you probably would have been feeling back in medieval times if you liked beer. If, however, like me, you preferred sparkling mineral water, you would have rolled your eyes and wished you'd been born five hundred years later.

         

F
AFFING
: From the verb “to faff,” which means, roughly, “to flutter around in a useless fashion instead of getting on with a task.” There also exists the derogatory form of “faff” used as a noun, as in, “That's a right
faff,
” which translates as “That is a thankless task with many wearisome details that will consume my entire life only to spit my shriveled remains back out once said hideous task is completed.” The alternative Scottish word with an identical meaning is “footer.” This is not to be confused with a “First-Footer,” which is the name given to the first person to set foot on one's doorstep after midnight on the 31st of December.

         

M
ONOPOLY
: The U.S. version versus the U.K. version. You say tuh-may-toe, we say tuh-mah-toe. Yes, it's this old thing again. Two nations divided by a common language, et cetera. Titus and Pandora's battered old Monopoly board probably looks more or less the same as yours, except the names of the streets are different. So I have to ask you to picture, if you will, the layout of a British Monopoly board. After passing Go, clutching your two hundred pounds sterling, you whiz past a round of neighborhoods arranged in an ascending spiral of desirability and expensiveness. In the U.K., just before you've performed an entire circuit of the board, you enter the dizzyingly
PUKKA
and exclusive neighborhoods of Mayfair and Park Lane, in which a stray metal hat, car, or oddly hollow dog would stick out like a box of Krispy Kremes at a Weight W
IBBLERS
Anonymous Convention. I am reliably informed that the equivalent neighborhoods on your U.S. Monopoly board go by the names Park Place and Boardwalk, in which you are pleased to dock your metal ship, press your iron, or even kick your boot.

         

N
AFFEST
F
IZZ
: The cheapest, nastiest, most headache-inducing and liver-rotting effervescent white wine ever to be poured into a bottle and passed off as champagne. Perfect for giving to houseguests you never wish to see again and also ideal for removing those unsightly stains from sinks and toilets.

         

P
ONG
: An unpleasant smell. Not as ghastly as a stink, but along the lines of a whiffy or even a niff. One could almost say that a
PONG
is a
NAFF NIFF
.

         

P
ORTAKABIN
: A prefabricated office unit made by the company of the same name. Frequently found on building sites, these box-like constructions provide a convenient and instant haven from the elements, being warm, cozy, draftproof, and ultimately portable. These units have the added advantage of being able to be linked together into P
ORTAKABIN
Central, or even stacked, one on top of the other, into P
ORTAKABIN
Heights. Pronunciation is crucial to the desirability or otherwise of these boxes. For years, as a child, I thought they were called pour-takka-bins and thus were something to haul one's trash around inside, although why one would wish to do such a thing was, for me, just one of the many mysteries of grownup life. In fact, I realized later, they are called porta (as in
portable
) kabins (as in
cabin
). There. See? Clear as mud.

         

P
UKKA
: Belonging to, or sounding like one comes from an aristocratic family who can trace their ancestors all the way back to the Middle Ages. A
PUKKA
accent sounds as if its owner is attempting to speak while holding a small plum in his or her mouth. Think Queen (the British regent, not the rock band). Remember how the British royal family speak?
You
(yes,
you
) can easily fake a
PUKKA
accent by sprinkling your conversation with some of the following:

         

“Oak-ay-yahh” for
yes.

“I say” for
duhh
.

“Hee-ah, hee-ah” for
yes
x 2.

“Hoo…rahh” for
yes
x 3.

“Ebb-sull-yute-lay nurt” for
no way.

Pronounced
PUCK-uh
.

         

W
IBBLERS
: This refers to that unfortunate sector of dragon-kind who have allowed their gross appetites free rein. Wolfing down princesses, knights, cupcakes, fries and mayonnaise, and lashings of sweet brown fizzy drinks, dragons who once had taut and muscular bodies are now wibbly-wobbly sacks-o'-flab. Hence the need for dragon diets, dragon gyms, and, regrettably, the magazine known as
Weight W
IBBLERS
Anonymous,
whose masthead reads
“If you wibble round your bum, then you sure need to swim and run,”
to which the only reply has to be
“If swimming is so good for keeping you slim, then explain whales!”

         

W
RINKLY
O
RIENTATED
: Generated by, or on the subject of
WRINKLIES
. A
WRINKLY
is anyone who has crossed the invisible divide separating the years 25 and 26. Some may disagree and state categorically that
WRINKLY
-dom begins after 30; some thump their frail and antique fists and maintain that 40 is the threshold of decrepitude. Myself, I prefer to acknowledge that I am, indeed, a
WRINKLY
, but should I ever wish to reduce the pleated and folded nature of my
WRINKLY
skin, I could consume fries by the bucketload and within a short time, I'd meta-morphose from
WRINKLY
to
WIBBLER
.