Pure Dead Frozen (9 page)

A Hole in Time

A
s the wolf leapt toward Pandora, Ludo Grabbit stepped out from behind the door to the wine cellar, his antique rifle raised to his shoulder in readiness. The air suddenly filled with a metallic-smelling red mist, and something knocked Pandora sideways. She fell over and crashed against the china cupboard, rattling everything on its shelves—including Tarantella, who'd been fast asleep, curled up inside her favorite teapot. Three hairy legs appeared over its porcelain rim, followed by a body, mouthparts gathered in a peeved pout.

“Turn it
down,
” the tarantula moaned. “Some of us are attempting to catch up on our beauty sleep. Some of us bitterly resent the intrusion of giant bipeds”—she peered at Pandora and shuddered—“bipeds adorned in lumps of gore…. Did you
know
you were wearing wolf tripe? Is this intentional? A fashion statement?”

Pandora sat up, pushing the dead wolf off with some difficulty. She found that she was shaking so hard she couldn't speak, and as for standing up, her legs simply refused to bear her weight. Ludo was by her side in an instant, followed by Titus.

“We've got to get out of here,” the lawyer said, hauling Pandora upright and propping her against the cupboard. “Tell me, is there any way out through the dungeons, or are they a complete dead end?”

“Out?” Titus waved a hand in the direction of the open door to the kitchen garden. “It's blowing a blizzard out there. We'll freeze to death. That is, if the wolves don't get us first.”

“We're going to die, aren't we?” Pandora whispered, her voice kitten-weak and shaky. “If not with the wolves, then we'll die out there in the snowstorm. No one will find our deep-frozen bodies until—”

“What a dear little ray of sunshine you've turned out to be, girl,” muttered Tarantella. “I'm so glad to be on your team. With your kind of positive attitude on board, I just know we're bound for victo—” The tarantula broke off in mid-sentence as Pandora scooped her off the cupboard and transferred her to a perch on her shoulder.

“There, pet lamb,” she said inaccurately, tenderly stroking the spider's furry body with a trembling hand. “Now you can nag me in comfort. You won't even have to raise your voice beyond a shrill cackle.”

Tarantella peered at Pandora with new respect. “My, my, my. Who's been sharpening their razor tongue, then? Tell me, O Snark Queen, which of the multiple options open to us are we going to select, hmm?”

Before Pandora could compose a suitably acid reply, the sound of many scuffling, skidding claws came from the kitchen garden; the door to the corridor shuddered, as if something heavy was being repeatedly flung against it; and, to Pandora's horror, another frosted muzzle poked through the broken window over the sink. With Ludo bringing up the rear, they fled through the wine cellar to the dungeons, not daring to look behind and see if they were being followed in case they slipped and fell down the mossy stairs into the depths of StregaSchloss.

“Dark,” complained Pandora, groping her way hand over hand along a cold stone wall.

“Observant, huh?” remarked Tarantella to no one in particular, her many eyes fixed simultaneously on the gloom ahead, the darkness behind, and the velvety black above and below.

“Wait up,” Ludo called, some distance behind the children, his voice bouncing off the walls to be immediately swallowed by the silence.

“Sssspoook-eee,” hissed Tarantella, clinging to Pandora's collar and hastily spinning a length of spider silk for extra anchorage. “Just think of that immense weight of soil right above our heads…and while we're at it, let's hope your forebears knew what they were doing when they built this place….”

“Can't you make her shut up?” Titus said through gritted teeth, already unnerved by having to grope his way along a particularly slimy section of wall. “This is bad enough without having to put up with that spider's doom-laden obs—”

“Shh,” Ludo commanded. “Listen. Can you hear that?”

“What? Hear what?” Pandora spun round to face where she imagined Ludo's voice had come from. Disorientated by the oppressive darkness, she realized she'd let go of the wall that had been her only means of navigation. Fumbling blindly, pawing the darkness, she reached out a hand to try and reorientate herself with the wall, but groped only air. The first sour mouthful of terror rose to the back of her throat, forcing her to swallow hard. “Er…,” she managed, both arms windmilling in slow motion as she tried and failed to find the wall again. “Titus?” she whispered, struggling to make her voice sound normal, desperately striving to breathe with lungs that were failing to draw the thickening air into them. “Titus? I'm very scared, Titus. Hello? Please?” And then the fear was all over her, uncontrollable—clabbering at her throat, her mouth; crushing her chest and squeezing the breath from her lungs. As she twisted round in a slow, collapsing coil of her own limbs, her nostrils suddenly filled with the resinous scent of pine sap, and her last conscious thought was a confused sensory-impression of dappled light and voices rushing toward her.

         

“Where? What?” Pandora struggled to sit up, but something was keeping her pinned to the ground. Overhead, sunlight winked through a mesh of tree branches, sunshine so dazzlingly bright that she had to close her eyes against the glare.

“Pan?” Titus's voice was close to her ear. “I seem to be making a habit of telling you not to panic, but we're not in the dungeons anymore. I don't know where we are, but you've got to wake up and get moving nowwww—”

There was a blast of intense heat, followed by a vaguely familiar thrumming, beating sound.
Where
had she heard that before? Pandora opened her eyes and rolled from her back onto her side. Beneath her lay a thick carpet of leaves and pine needles. Raising her head, she saw several things in quick succession: Titus's face, pale as milk; tree trunks stretching into the distance behind him like an infinite bar code; and finally, worryingly, a vast, scaly pillar of a leg, terminating in a paw the size of a car tire—a paw that was drumming its deadly talons on the ground in front of Pandora in a decidedly tetchy manner.

Another blast of heat, this time close enough to set fire to a large swath of forest floor and confirm just what exactly was towering over both her and her brother. A vast dragon peered down at Pandora, visibly confused by a repeat appearance of this dwarfish snack. Months ago, Pandora had borrowed Mrs. McLachlan's Alarming Clock and had found herself traveling back to a time when dragons roosted in Argyll. Back then, she'd narrowly escaped being toasted by this particular specimen of dragonhood; somehow she doubted whether her luck was going to hold for an encore.

“Mair bluidy stunted DWARVES!” the dragon roared, its tone indicating just how exceedingly delighted it wasn't.

Pandora craned her head back, squinting against the sunlight, all the better to see the owner of the roar.

“AYE. And twa WEE ones, at that. No' a SCRAP of meat on eithera rem, I'll warrant….” And with another incendiary snort, the monstrous dragon turned its back on Titus and Pandora to address its complaints to someone as yet unseen. “HOW am I supposed tae keep body and SOWL together if you keep sending me MALNOURISHED DWARVES? Twa wee skittery mouthfuls of skin and bone won't go far in
my
roost. I tell you, crone, we DRAGONS are headet for EXTINGUISHMENT if THIS is the best you can do….” Muttering to itself and emitting small snorts of flame, it rummaged behind a tree, producing a lethal assortment of kitchen implements that looked as if they'd been hewn out of granite by a homicidally inclined Neanderthal. It rattled these in a menacing fashion and continued, “I
could
shave them very thinly over ma GRUEL, but frankly they're hardly worth the effort. They're not RIPE yet, so they'll not taste of very much at all. See, what I NEED, crone, is something SUBSTATIONAL to feed my family. A nice fat baawool, or an UDDERMOO—och, we could even make do with a RAMBLEAT if we hadty. A few dozen cluckstones or a flocka GOBBLEHISSES…even a maiden would do at a pinch, but only a PLUMPTIOUS one, mind, not a gaunt wee GOBLINETTE like this one here….” And to Pandora's horror, the dragon turned round and plucked her off the ground, clasping her in its scaly paw for a heart-stopping moment before thrusting her toward a figure that stood some way off in the deckled shadow of the trees.

The figure came toward her, moving slowly as if it feared that too sudden a movement might make it shatter into a thousand pieces. It raised an arm, and in a quavery voice as familiar to Pandora as her own breathing, said, “Stop drooling, dragon. What you clasp in your paws is
not
a posset or a breakfast. This human child is my kin. Or…at least, she
will
be. Several hundred years from now, she will be my great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. Therefore I command you to put her down at once.”

“Your
kin
? Why didn't you say so BEFORE?” the dragon gasped, carefully depositing Pandora in front of her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Strega-Nonna.

Pandora blinked. Although she was deeply grateful to Strega-Nonna for saving her from being turned into a blackened crisp, she was completely confused by finding her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother popping up in the middle of the forest. What was the old lady doing
here
? For all of Pandora's life, Strega-Nonna had lived in the freezer at StregaSchloss; only on special occasions would she appear, defrosted and dripping, ready to pull crackers or blow out cake candles before tottering back to her icy bed. Fortunately for Pandora, this was not a special occasion, and Strega-Nonna appeared to have no intention of returning to her freezer.

“
Quiet,
beast,” the old lady snapped, turning away from the dragon to peer at Pandora as if she couldn't quite believe what she saw. “You? Here? Both of you?” Her voice had dropped to a whisper as she gazed beyond Pandora to where Titus stood, rubbing at his eye while trying to keep as much distance as possible between himself and the dragon. “You cannot be here,” Strega-Nonna mumbled to herself. “Cannot. The children of the future have no place here in the past.”

Titus stepped forward, still keeping as much air between himself and the now unashamedly dribbly dragon. He rubbed his eye and squinted at Strega-Nonna, as if unable to see her clearly.

“Nonna? You've lived round here for centuries, haven't you? I mean, if anyone knows StregaSchloss, it's you, isn't it? Reason I'm asking is that I'm beginning to think that there have always been…sort of…holes—holes in time here at StregaSchloss.” Titus shook his head and rubbed his eye again. “Uh, I'm not explaining this very well—”

“Telling
me
!” muttered Tarantella, emerging from the collar of Pandora's shirt and opening her mouthparts in an exaggerated yawn. “Do go on,” she said, waving a hairy leg in Titus's direction.

Titus's mouth shut with a snap. He glared at Tarantella, then hissed through clenched teeth, “Right, spider. If you're so damn smart, you take over. You explain it for us all.”

Tarantella sighed. “Dear boy, metaphysics never was my strong suit. In my humble way, with my teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy arachnid brain, what I think you're trying to describe are StregaSchloss's time portals. Yes?”

“Whatever,” Titus mumbled, somehow managing with just one word to radiate complete and total lack of interest, coupled with deeply contemptuous teenage disdain.

“Thank you, thank you for being
such
a great audience here today.” Tarantella arranged her mouthparts in an approximation of a leer. “As I was saying before I was deafened by your applause, time portals are like doors leading to the past or the future. What has happened here is that you and your sister have accidentally blundered through a portal. How, when, and
if
you return to your own time is another matter completely….” She heaved a theatrical sigh and batted her many eyelashes at Titus. “I suppose you'll simply have to thrash around here in this limitless forest until you either accidentally stumble back out the way you came in or get eaten up by one of our friend here's less biddable friends and relations….”

Titus paled and edged further away from the dragon.

“Enough.” Strega-Nonna wagged her finger in rebuke at Tarantella. “You'll scare the boy half to death.
I
will lead the children back to their own time. I know the way.”

It was Pandora's turn to blanch as she remembered the invasion of wolves that had made them flee to the dungeons in the first place. “We
can't
go back.” She shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself for comfort. “The house is full of
wolves
—we came down here to the dungeons to escape them.”