Survivor (13 page)
Authors: Colin Thompson
Look through a murky arched window in deepest Patagonia, and this is what you might see…
Every day five of the Flood children travel halfway round the world to Quicklime College, the ultimate school for witches and wizards. There’s no time for silly games flying around on broomsticks. Sports day is coming up, and before you even wonder how four-legged Satanella copes with the three-legged race, here’s a secret for you. Orkward Warlock, the vilest child in the school, and his sidekick, The Toad, hate the big happy Floods family. And they’re plotting to kill the Floods – on sports day.
The Floods family are on the run!
Travel back in time to faraway Transylvania Waters and find out what happened when a lowly drain cleaner called Nerlin Flood fell in love with the royal princess Mordonna. Can the two escape from an explosively angry King Quatorze, the nastiest spies in the land, and the prospect of life down the toilet? Why does their eldest child, Valla, drink blood? Was Satanella really turned into a dog because of an accident with a prawn and a faulty wand? This is your chance to find out how all the Floods children came to be born – or created.
How Much Blood and Fear Can YOU Handle?
It was a dark and moonless night and in
the darkness something stirred…
OUT NOW!
The body had obviously been dead for a while. Grass had started growing out of its nose and a family of Patagonian Pocket Mice had built a nest in one of the jacket sleeves.
CSI special investigator Septic took out his blue torch and shone it in the corpse’s face. The body was out in broad daylight so the torch light was barely visible, but the blue torch was always the first thing Septic used at a crime scene and rules were rules, especially in forensic science.
Putting on a pair of rubber gloves, Septic began to go through the victim’s pockets.
‘Interesting,’ he said, holding up a small brown object and handing it to his assistant, Oily. ‘Bag this.’
Oily put the object in his mouth and sucked it. He rolled it around with his tongue, frowned, sucked it some more then swallowed it.
‘I said bag it, not eat it,’ said Septic. ‘I wanted it analysed back in the lab.’
‘No need, boss,’ said Oily. ‘I can tell you all you need to know. Treacle toffee from a small town in Belgium. Unlike normal Belgian treacle toffee, which is made with one hundred percent local products, this one has been tampered with. It contained treacle from Transylvania Waters.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ Septic asked.
‘Because only Transylvania Waters treacle contains lethal amounts of arsenic,’ said Oily and dropped down dead.
‘Fair enough,’ said Septic.
This sort of thing happened all the time and the Crime Scene Investigation department always kept at least ten Oily clones on hand to cover the sudden assistant-becoming-dead situations that occurred about four times a week. Septic spoke into his phone and a couple of minutes later an identical assistant arrived.
‘Your first observation?’ said Septic.
‘Our killer was a very considerate person,’ said Oily.
‘How so?’
‘Well, look where we are, chief,’ Oily replied. ‘In the school graveyard. I mean, we’ve got less than ten metres to go to bury the body.’
‘That’s another thing,’ said Septic. ‘Don’t you think it’s strange for a school to have a graveyard?’
The two investigators and the dead body were standing at the entrance to the graveyard at Quicklime College, the famous yet very secretive school where all the students were witches and wizards apart from a few ghosts and ogres.
1
This was the school where five of the Flood children went every day.
And the dead body
was
standing, not lying down like dead people are supposed to. It was leaning against the left stone gatepost with an absent-minded expression on its face as if it had been waiting for a bus rather than being in a becoming-dead situation. What made the
scene even more mysterious was that the victim, although dead in Patagonia in South America, had half a return ticket clutched in his left hand for the journey from Bruges Town Hall to the city morgue, which was many thousands of kilometres away in Europe.
2
‘So, do you think the victim was Belgian, chief?’ said Oily.
‘Possibly,’ said Septic. ‘Though of course, he could have been a bus ticket collector.’
This turned out to be the case, because a search of all the victim’s pockets turned up bus tickets from eighteen other countries, including Wales and Tristan da Cunha, which doesn’t even have a bus service…
1
There were not enough ghosts and ogres of school age to support a school of their own so they were allowed to study at Quicklime’s along with the regular students and the Smith-Klaxon cannibal triplets.
2
Of course, bright readers will know already that Patagonia is in South America and that Bruges is a town in Belgium, which in Europe, and that the two countries are on opposite sides of the world, but unfortunately some of you might have teachers who know a bit less about geography than a blind upside-down cave fish and who think Bruges are those purple marks you get on your skin when you bang yourself.
