Pure Dead Brilliant (11 page)

“Now, dear.” Mrs. McLachlan patted Pandora's shoulder. “Wipe your eyes and look after your wee girls while I help your mother.” A second little girl emerged from the car, tripped over a marble flower urn, and fell onto a crumbling gravestone with a wail of dismay.

“Oh lord—” Pandora spun round, alerted by the loud howls coming from her daughter. “Rose, poppet, Mummy's coming. . . .”

Little moans escaped from Pandora's lips as she absorbed this unwanted snippet of information with glassy-eyed horror. Twins, she thought, TWINS? But I
never
want to have children, I've
always
said that. . . .

“Clumsy, isn't she?” confided the first little girl, slipping her hand into Damp's gloved one and gazing adoringly at her aunt. Behind them, Pandora picked up the sobbing Rose and bore her off in Mrs. McLachlan's wake.

“Where is Uncle Titus?” continued the child, tugging Damp's hand to gain her attention. “Can we see him? Is he in that box? Is he sleeping? Mummy says he's going to heaven, but how will he find the way? Mummy used to say he was awful at reading maps—”

“It's a Borgia failing,” sighed Damp. “Come on, Lily, let's go and find Grandma, shall we?”

Minutes later, a small group of mourners stood at the ornate metal gate to the family crypt, shivering as they watched the pallbearers coming toward them with a coffin on their shoulders. Behind them came Signor and Signora Strega-Borgia, followed by Damp and Pandora. Around the crypt lay banks of lilies, waiting for the time when all the living had gone, leaving the dead to wither along with their flowers. Pandora stumbled and retraced her steps to where one of her shoes lay embedded, its heel stuck in a grassy hummock.

Mrs. McLachlan's eyes began to water uncontrollably as she saw the three little figures of Titus's bereaved children running across the graveyard in the wake of their mother, Mercedes Strega-Borgia. Titus's glamorous widow was currently loping across the grass toward the crypt, trailing furs and pearls and arriving in a cloud composed of equal parts aggression and hysteria.

The widow gathered her sons about herself and glared at the assembled mourners. Mercedes's eyes were suspiciously dry. Moreover, her immediate concerns appeared to be more materialistic than spiritual, as the occasion demanded. To wit:

“—and if you vultures think you're going to see one penny of my husband's estate, you can think again.” Mercedes waved her bejeweled hands for emphasis.

“Oh, per-lease,” hissed Damp. “Spare us. I hardly think that now is the time to be discussing Titus's money.”

Signor and Signora Strega-Borgia made no comment. Shrouded in deepest black, their pale faces bore witness to the fact that they were living through every parent's worst nightmare, coming here to this depressing Scottish graveyard to bury their only son. Swathed in black organza, Signora Strega-Borgia clutched her husband's arm for support. Lily and Rose, dimly sensing that this was not a Happy Day, began to whine.

A gray drizzle began to fall at the same moment as a tiny member of the family emerged from the crypt. Tarantella, tarantula extraordinaire, paused on the stone step, produced a microscopically small lipstick from some hidden part of her anatomy, and raked the family with a withering stare.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Cheer up. It's not the end of the
world. . . .” She paused, applied a smear of lipstick to her mouth, and waved a few legs in the direction of the leaden sky. “Sure, it's raining, and that is pretty hideous, but as for this”— she scampered out of the crypt, scaled the leg of one of the pallbearers, and leapt onto the lid of Titus's coffin—“it's not as if he's going to be all alone. There's five hundred or so of my children down there in the crypt, just waiting for him, and they'll make sure he's comfy. . . .” With a hairy leg, Tarantella pointed back into the crypt, where, dangling from cobwebs, the whole interior appeared to be alive with grinning spiders.

“But, but—” Pandora gasped, “Titus
hated
. . . .”

The image on the screen froze, the millions of spiders halted in mid-dangle, Pandora's face caught for all time with her mouth open, the soundtrack playing, as if stuck in a rut,
“hated, hated, hated, hated . . .”
the incessant repetition removing all meaning from the word until, as Titus and Pandora simultaneously stood up to leave the map room, to their ears it sounded more like
“fated, fated, fated, fated . . .”

Under the Weather

S
ignora Strega-Borgia turned off the shower and wrapped herself in a towel. Wiping steam off the bathroom mirror, she gazed at her reflection with a critical eye, then, picking up the hairbrush, began the ritual of readying herself to face the morning. Halfway through getting dressed, she was hit by a wave of nausea so strong, she barely made it to the sink in time.

“Oh dear,” she whispered, turning on the cold tap and opening the bathroom window to remove the sour smell of vomit. “Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear . . .”

Luciano was right, she thought: storing rodent droppings in a coffee jar was foolhardy, horribly unsanitary, and probably the cause of her current malaise. Recovering slightly, she pulled on a black linen dress and slipped her feet into a pair of fuchsia-pink flip-flops. As she walked along the corridor to the stairs, she wondered if she dared risk breakfast, given the upset state of her stomach. Descending the main staircase, she caught the faintest odor of cooked bacon and nearly gagged.

Hoping to have a quiet word with Signora Strega-Borgia and raise her deep concern about the threat that Fiamma d'Infer posed to Damp, Mrs. McLachlan kept the kitchen door ajar and listened for the distinctive sound of her employer's flip-flops
shlepp-shlepp
ing downstairs. Peering into the corridor, she caught sight of her employer suddenly stopping halfway down the main staircase and clutching the banister. Puzzled, the nanny watched as Signora Strega-Borgia gingerly descended to the ground floor then—at high speed, considering her footwear—bolted out the front door to be abruptly sick over the stone griffin that graced the front steps.

“Oh
dear,
” muttered Signora Strega-Borgia, propping herself upright on a stone pillar. She was dimly aware of the familiar engine sound of the family car, and she looked up from the besmirched statuary to see her husband pulling up on the rose-quartz drive, waving and mouthing something through the driver's window. Another wave of nausea forced her attentions back to the stone griffin, and when she next opened her eyes, it was to see Luciano bending over her, his eyes full of concern.

“Cara mia
,
”
he murmured, wrapping a protective arm around her shoulders and producing a clean linen handkerchief, which he used to wipe round her mouth. “You are unwell,” he stated, somewhat unnecessarily, since Signora Strega-Borgia bent once again over the griffin, and provided ample evidence that this was indeed the case. Mrs. McLachlan appeared on the doorstep with Damp and Nestor trailing behind her.

“Oh, you poor dear.” The nanny made soothing clucking sounds and patted her employer on the back. “Let's get you inside and I'll make you a cup of mint tea to settle your stomach.” So preoccupied was she with her ailing employer that she failed to notice when Damp hauled a large golf umbrella out of the stand by the door and started to wave it around purposefully. It wasn't until Signor Strega-Borgia had picked his wife up in his arms and carried her inside that Mrs. McLachlan turned her attention back to Damp, just in time to see the little girl wave the umbrella in the direction of the boot cupboard.

“NO! DAMP! STOP—”

There was a crash, immediately followed by the unmistakable sound of breaking glass. The nanny groaned as she peered round the door of the cupboard. Where seconds before had been the family and their guests' collection of ancient Wellingtons, gardening shoes, rusting ice skates, muddy soccer cleats, tennis shoes, broomstick crampons, fork-toed mules, ceremonial high-heeled calfskin waders, and moldy hiking boots, now stood rows of gleaming glass slippers, in every size from infant up to adult. Broken glass littered the floor of the cupboard, where toppling piles of footwear had succumbed to the laws governing glass and gravity.

Firmly shutting the door of the boot cupboard, Mrs. McLachlan removed the offending umbrella from Damp's hands and tutted. “My fault, dear. I should have been paying attention. No umbrellas or shooting sticks for
you,
I think. . . .”

Plucking Damp up into her arms and calling for Nestor, she headed to the kitchen to make Signora Strega-Borgia's promised mint tea.

In the pantry, the rats Multitudina and Terminus were deciding how best to treat the recent amputee, Tarantella. The tarantula lay between them on a spotlessly clean tea towel, eyes closed, and utterly motionless as overhead the rats discussed her condition.

“Did you get the cobwebs?” Terminus looked up from her perusal of an ancient copy of
Allopathica for Arachnidae,
open at the section “A Disquisitione on the Mattere of Amputatione and Hydropathie.”

“Check,” muttered Multitudina, dipping her front paws into a stolen capful of dish soap. They emerged green and slimy and, wincing slightly, the rat began to rub them across the bristles of a toothbrush (also stolen).

“What on earth are you doing?” Terminus peered over the edge of her book and sneezed as a flurry of soap bubbles drifted across the pantry.

“Scrubbing up,” coughed Multitudina, her head surrounded by a cloud of froth from the dish soap. “I'll be the surgeon, you can be the anesthetist. . . .”

Terminus returned to her studies, skipping forward from “Amputatione” to “Anaesthesiae” with some difficulty, since the pages appeared to be stuck together with dried blood. Minutes later she looked up in alarm to see Multitudina holding a lit match in one paw and an enormous darning needle in the other. Flickering shadows flitted over Tarantella as Multitudina held the needle in the flame.

“What are you doing
now
?” squeaked Terminus.

“One of the first principles of surgery,” muttered Multitudina, her eyes narrowed in concentration, “is that everything has to be squeaky clean, so I'm sterilizing this
needle with heat. . . .”

“Well, I'm going down to the cellar for some anesthetic,” Terminus said. “Try not to burn the house down while I'm away. . . .”

Half an hour later, Tarantella regained consciousness to find that she'd died and gone not, as expected, straight to heaven, but to some dark and nightmarish place. By the light of a guttering candle she saw two rats bending over her, one wielding an enormous needle with a long piece of pink thread trailing out of one end, and the other rat inviting her to drink something out of a thimble.

“Drink?” she squawked. “Are you out of your tiny mind? I'm a
spider
. I don't
do
wet.”

She attempted to struggle into an upright position, then suddenly something hard crashed into her head, and everything went mercifully black.

“What did you do that for?” Multitudina squeaked reproachfully. “You didn't have to
hit
her with the brandy bottle, just persuade her to drink some of its contents—”

“You're
way
too sensitive to be a proper surgeon,” hissed Terminus. “Come on. Stop wasting time. She's unconscious now—you may as well get on
with it. . . .”

Terminus slumped back on her haunches beside Tarantella, watching for signs of returning consciousness. She was desperately trying not to look as Multitudina's needle dipped in and out of the skin round the wound where Tarantella's leg had been so violently amputated. To distract herself from the gruesomeness of the surgery, she returned to her reading matter, but the soggy crunching sounds coming from the operating table were hard to ignore.

At last Multitudina threw down her needle, bit off an extraneous length of pink thread, and spat it on the floor.
“There,”
she said with considerable satisfaction. “Done.” She stood back to admire her handiwork. Where previously had been a gaping wound, there was now a neat little line of pink stitches. She turned to look at Terminus just in time to see her draining the contents of the thimble.

“A toashhht,” Terminus hiccuped. “To—um—to . . .
hic—
”

“You drunken slob. You're totally
legless,
” Multitudina said accusingly.

“On the contrary,” gasped Tarantella, regaining consciousness in time to catch the tail end of this exchange. “
I'm
legless, and you, madam, are just plain
drunk
.”

Soggy Batteries

T
itus and Pandora sat on the end of the jetty, staring morosely across Lochnagargoyle, listening to the gentle slap and suck of waves against the worn planks beneath them. Drifting down from the meadow came the voices of Signora Strega-Borgia's classmates practicing their craft. So immersed in thought were Titus and Pandora that they didn't even attempt to bat away the clouds of gnats feasting on their exposed skin. Overhead the sun beat down out of a clear summery sky, but down on the jetty the mood was closer to winter.

Titus shivered, the motion causing ripples to spread outward from where his feet dangled in the loch, his toes white and shriveled from prolonged immersion. Clearing her throat, Pandora broke the silence.

“Eughhh. That was just so horrible, wasn't it? And so
real,
too. I mean, how did they
do
that—make Mum and Dad look so old and Damp grown-up? Where could they find actors that looked just like
us
? And why? Why did they do it?”

“They?” said Titus. “
They?
What d'you mean? There isn't a film company on the planet that could do that. . . .”

“The special effects weren't
that
special, Titus. With makeup and latex masks
and . . . and, well . . . anyway, it can't be
that
difficult to make a wee film clip and post it on the Internet.”

Titus turned to face his sister and grabbed her by both shoulders. “That's
not
what I mean. Didn't you hear me in there? When the clip started I said, ‘That's like my dream,' and it was. Word for word. Exactly like the nightmare I had last night. No one on earth could have done that and then made sure that I had my own up-close-and-personal, one-to-one premiere in my own head, in my own b-b-bed. . . .” He abruptly released his grip and turned away, shoulders shaking, brushing unwelcome tears away from his face.

“Oh, Titus, that's
awful
. . . .” Pandora shuddered, her arms suddenly covered in gooseflesh as the meaning of her brother's words sank in.

“Creepy, isn't it?” Titus was barely audible.

“I just don't understand what's going on.” Pandora's voice was muffled as she gnawed thoughtfully on a fingernail. “You said you'd got other e-mails before that one, remember? One about a car, another from someone meeting you at a plane, and the last one, the really scary one that warned you—”

“Get rid of it,” Titus interrupted. “The e-mail told me to get rid of it, give it away, burn it—whatever
it
is—then something about the Borgias having to break the chain. . . . Pan, I don't know what on earth any of that was about. None of it makes any sense to me at all.”

A snapping sound from behind them made Titus and Pandora turn in time to see Ffup hurtling down the overgrown path that led from the meadow to the loch shore. The dragon's eyes were wide in alarm as she lolloped across the pebbly beach pursued by Fiamma d'Infer.

“Don't be such a wimp!” the witch panted, brushing aside the brambles and wild roses lining the path. “I just need a tiny bit of dragon's blood after all—” She stopped, realizing that she had been overheard. Fixing an insincere smile on her face, she waved at Titus and Pandora and spun on her heel to head back up to the meadow. Unaware that she was no longer the witch's quarry, Ffup was running flat out along the jetty, her massive weight causing its wooden planks to bounce up and down, threatening to catapult Titus and Pandora into the loch.

“Calm
down
!” yelled Titus, as Ffup bounded toward him. “Slow DOWN! YOU'RE GOING TO—”

With a tremendous splash, Ffup belly-flopped into the loch, displacing a tidal wave of a volume equal to that of a full-grown dragon, most of which landed on Titus and Pandora. Ffup rolled onto her back, paddling serenely with all four limbs, and emitting little snorts of steam from her nostrils.

“Gosh, did I do that? Heck, I'm really sorry,” she gasped, uncomfortably aware that this was a somewhat inadequate apology for half-drowning one's mistress's offspring. “Can I help you dry off? Give you guys a quick blow-dry?”

“NO!” yelled Pandora, her recent experience of being roasted in dragon-fire reminding her that she still had Mrs. McLachlan's alarm clock in her back pocket. “Oh
NO
!” she wailed, leaping to her feet and recovering the clock from her wet jeans. “Oh, you
dumb
dragon . . . what have you
done
?”

“Don't know,” mumbled Ffup, paddling across to the jetty, “but I have a feeling that you're about to tell me. . . .”

“Is that Mrs. McLachlan's clock?” Titus stood to look at the object in his sister's hands as Pandora fiddled with something on the back of the clock and frowned. Intrigued, Ffup dragged herself out of the water onto the jetty, her weight making it tilt dangerously to one side, causing Titus and Pandora to lose their balance and topple straight on top of the dripping dragon. Pandora's shriek turned into a bubbling splutter as the waters of Lochnagargoyle closed over her head. She surfaced seconds later, still clutching the alarm clock, with Titus clinging round her neck and underwater thrashings indicating that Ffup wasn't far behind.

“You
idiot
!” she yelled, treading water as she attempted to loosen Titus's grip. “Let go, Titus, you're going to drown us both. Relax—the water's not that deep. Put your hands on my shoulders and I'll tow you to shore.”

Eyes squinched shut, twelve years and eleven months into his shameful career as a non-swimming aquaphobe, Titus clutched his sister's shoulders as instructed, and within seconds found his footing on the bottom of the loch. Behind them, Ffup surfaced in a cloud of steam and waddled onto dry land, trailing seaweed in her wake.

“I'm freezing,” Titus moaned, crawling onto the beach and collapsing facedown on the pebbles with his eyes shut.

“Let's go back to the house . . . Oh
no
. . . I must have pushed the— Oh lord, what time is it?” Pandora peered at the clock. “Um, Titus, there's something I think you ought to know.”

“What?”

“Don't throw a hissy fit. Just take a look around and tell me if you notice anything different.”

“Pandora? What are you on about?” Titus sat up and opened his eyes. His mouth dropped open and his voice rose in pitch to a squeak. “
What's going on? Where are we?
Pandora, where's . . . ?” He waved a violently trembling hand across the meadow to where the familiar turrets of StregaSchloss were horribly absent.

Under strict instructions not to open her mouth, Ffup trailed disconsolately through the rhododendrons behind Titus and Pandora. Mounting a clandestine reconnaissance operation with a vast mythical beast in tow was proving to be more difficult than anticipated, but the comfort of Ffup's protective presence outweighed her unsuitability as a spy. She crawled along the ground, complaining fitfully as her knees and elbows encountered sharp sticks and stones.

“My manicure's just ruined—I mean, look at my talons, the polish is all chipped,” she whined as the group halted by the herbaceous border that used to surround the east wing of StregaSchloss. Squinting through the glossy rhododendron leaves, the dragon gave a snort of dismay.

“Who built that monstrosity?” she demanded, gazing in disgust at the glass-and-steel sprawl that stood in place of the architectural jewel that had been StregaSchloss. “And tell me this: how did they build it while we were having a wee dip in the loch? We can't have been gone more than ten minutes and look at it—it's massive.”

It was, Titus agreed. Massive, overblown, and utterly without charm. In the midday sun its glassy walls threw back dazzling shards of light, searing the eyes of the group huddled in the bushes. Parked outside on the unchanged rose-quartz drive was a dented Aston Martin, a vintage Jaguar convertible, and a utilitarian Range Rover. A young man in khaki overalls crawled out from under the Aston Martin and swore loudly.

“Look at those
cars,
” Titus whispered in awe. “Whoever lives in that house must be either rolling in it or have some very rich friends. . . .”

A large glass panel slid across the front of the house, and a portly figure emerged from the building.

“I bet that's the owner,” Titus remarked, watching as the figure strolled across the drive to where the man in overalls was dropping wrenches into a toolbox.

“Shhh, I can't hear what they're saying,” hissed Pandora, adding, “I wonder who he is?”

The figure under discussion bent over the side of the Aston Martin to examine something under the fender, thus exposing a vast acreage of tweed-clad bottom for inspection by the watchers in the bushes.

“He's got a major lard problem, whoever he is—look at the
size
of his—”

“Of his what?” prompted Pandora, as her brother fell silent and his eyes grew wide.

“Tell me it's not,” Titus whimpered, his head sinking into his hands as he realized who he was looking at. Another figure appeared at the open glass panel—a woman, who shrieked in tones all too audible for comfort:

“Titus! For heaven's sake—you're going to be late for your appointment. Get a move on—you can take the Range Rover instead.”

“Titus?” squeaked Pandora. “Is that man—is that . . . is that
you
? Grown up? Eurrrrch. What a chub, what a porky.” Unable to stop herself, she added, “I always did say you had the appetite of an elephant—now you've got the dimensions of one, too.”

“Let me see that clock.” Titus glared at his sister as she produced Mrs. McLachlan's alarm clock for his inspection.

“Water must have got into it—that's not the right time.”

“Titus, I told you: it doesn't tell the time, it tells you the year, dumbo. It's 2022—it's the
future—do
keep up.”

“I want to go back,” Titus said. “I don't want to see what happens next. I
know
what happens. That fat slob is going to die in nine years' time, and frankly, having seen what he's like, that's not a moment too soon. I can't take much more of this. I don't want to grow up if it means being like . . . like
him
. Please, Pan, let's go back. Now.”

Something in his voice convinced Pandora that he'd really had enough. With a sigh, she pulled out the reset knob and turned it counterclockwise till the display read 20:02 once more. “Time travel made easy, huh?” she said, pressing the knob.

Nothing happened. There was no spinning sensation, no crashing out of control into the herbaceous border in front of StregaSchloss. Pandora checked the time. She pulled the knob back out, then pressed it back in again, and still nothing happened. Out on the drive, the obese Titus waddled toward the Range Rover and squeezed into the driver's seat. The loud woman disappeared into the glass building, and the man in overalls opened the hood of the Aston Martin and hunted for something in his toolbox.

“What's wrong?” Titus looked over Pandora's shoulder as she twiddled with the reset knob.

“I don't know. Maybe it's not working after its dip in Lochnagargoyle—”

“I can dry it off,” Ffup suggested, giving a couple of snorts of flame by way of example.

“NO!” Titus and Pandora shrieked in stereo.

“You guys are way too picky,” Ffup complained. “Could we quit futzing around and just get out of here? I need to get back home
now
. Nestor's due for a feed—
over
due, in fact—and he'll scream the place down if I don't get back pronto and do the needful.”

Pandora looked up from tinkering with the clock and scowled. “Ffup, I can't get us back to StregaSchloss right now. Thanks to you bouncing us into the loch, the clock isn't working, and until I fix it, we're stuck here.”

“AUGHHHHHH!” wailed the dragon, displaying a maternal streak hitherto absent from her behavior. “My poor
baby
. He'll
starve
without his mummy, he'll fade away to noth—”

“Stop being such a drama queen,” said Titus. “Hush up, for heaven's sake. Mrs. McLachlan will feed your precious infant.”

“Oh no, she won't,” muttered Ffup, wrapping her front legs tightly round her ribs. “Not unless she happens to be a dragon.”

Titus glared at Ffup. “What are you on about? Mrs. McLachlan feeds Nestor every day.”

“Not with dragon's milk, she doesn't,” Ffup insisted. “He's not properly weaned yet. Sure he'll eat porridge and Miserablios, fruit and other mush, but he needs his mum to give him the Real Thing. I mean,
look
at me. . . .” The dragon threw her front legs outward in a dramatic gesture designed to draw attention to the fact that Nestor's lunch was not only ready and waiting, but present in such abundance that it was dribbling down Ffup's chest.

“Stop, please,” Titus begged, snapping his eyes shut and trying not to gag. “Spare me the details. . . . Trust me, there are some things that I simply don't need to know.”

“Look, here are the batteries.” Pandora removed four flat little cells from the underside of the clock and examined them. “I don't
think
they got wet when we fell in the loch. The clock's waterproof and there's a sort of silicone seal round the battery compartment. What
a relief . . . I guess they must just be dead after all.”