Pure Dead Brilliant (18 page)

Sleeping Boaty

F
or a split second, Pandora thought she'd been blinded. Being plunged from the fading light of the drawing room into pitch darkness left her completely disoriented, but the voices of her mother and Mrs. McLachlan complaining about the lack of light made her realize that whatever had happened and wherever she was, she wasn't alone.

“Oh lord, what
now
?” Baci struggled to disentangle herself from Mrs. McLachlan, her hands touching the reassuring soggy diaper of her youngest daughter. “Damp, is that you, darling?”

“Hold on just a wee moment, madam.” The nanny's voice was followed by a faint click. Immediately there was light—admittedly only a mere glimmer—but enough for Pandora to see the faces of her mother, Damp, and Mrs. McLachlan, who appeared to be holding her Alarming Clock in both hands. The nanny's eyes twinkled in the glow from the clock face.

“Such a
useful
clock, this one,” she said, stretching out to illuminate the bodies littering the floor around them.

“Oh no!” gasped Signora Strega-Borgia, staring in horror at the still forms of her husband and son, who lay crumpled on the floor.

“They're not dead, madam. They're asleep,” Mrs. McLachlan said hastily, patting Baci's arm. “It would appear that your younger daughter has inadvertently cast a spell.”

“Sleeping Boaty,” Damp agreed, sucking her sore finger as she glared at the vase of blood-red roses. “Nasty yuck flower. Burrrny.”

“My
younger
—? Damp? Are you telling me that
Damp
did this?” Baci waved a trembling hand at the sleeping bodies littering the drawing room. “How? She's just a baby. Infants aren't supposed to be able to work magic. It takes a real witch like m-m-m—” Baci's voice trailed off as she grasped the significance of Damp's newfound abilities.

“She's a magus,” Mrs. McLachlan said sadly, adding, “The poor wee soul.”

Baci gasped, but Pandora disregarded this information.

“Yes, but—where are we? What is this? What time . . . ?”

Mrs. McLachlan looked at her wristwatch, sighed, and then peered hopefully at the mantelpiece clock. “It's round about half-past eight,” she said, frowning at Pandora.

“But it's
dark,
” complained Signora Strega-Borgia.

“That's part of the spell.” Mrs. McLachlan stood up with Damp in her arms and pointed to the door. “Come this way, we have work to do.”

Pandora and Mrs. McLachlan left Signora Strega-Borgia and Damp in the candlelit nursery, promising to return soon. Damp sat surrounded by picture books, apparently content to be left reading till summoned. Closing the door behind her,
the nanny led the way downstairs. Still sprawled across the
hall floor, Fiamma d'Infer snored quietly, a trail of drool
puddling on the floor near her mouth, like the antithesis of Sleeping Beauty.

“First things first,” Mrs. McLachlan said, returning to the drawing room and picking her way across to the window with the aid of a lit candelabra. The window, like every window and door at StregaSchloss, was now crisscrossed with an impenetrable thicket of briar roses, their wicked thorns forming a barrier to both the passage of daylight and human traffic. They were effectively trapped inside the house by Damp's invocation of the
Sleeping Beauty
spell.

“What time did you say it was?” Pandora said, peering at the girth of one of the briar stems, which was as thick as her wrist.

“If you mean what
year
did I say it was, I didn't. However, since you ask, the
time
is now ten to nine, but the year is still 2002,” Mrs. McLachlan snapped, her unfriendly tone of voice causing Pandora's self-control to dissolve in a flood of tears.

“You're still a-a-angry at m-m-meeee,” she wailed, collapsing abruptly on the sleeping mound of Knot, and noting distractedly that while the yeti was sleeping due to Damp's enchantment, his fur certainly wasn't. It seethed with lice, the infestation apparently immune to the workings of magic. Pandora was too miserable to care.

“Everyone else in this family gets away with murder except
me,
” she howled. “Because of Titus, we've got a psychotic gunman in our midst, Damp gets away with casting spells that plunge us all into some insane version of
Sleeping Beauty,
but when I allow my rats to go loose and accidentally touch your precious alarm clock . . .” She paused to blow her nose on the slumbering Knot, allowing the yeti's unhygienic arm to flop back onto the floor, as with a deep sniff she continued, “The only one in this whole household who understands me is Tarantella, and she's—she's—” Reminded of the little injured body she'd tucked up in her doll's house, Pandora's face crumpled. This time, however, she found herself wrapped in Mrs. McLachlan's warm arms—held in an embrace within which Pandora realized that she was not only loved, but forgiven.

“Och, pet,” the nanny murmured, “I'm far angrier with myself than with you. . . . I should have kept that alarm clock locked up, out of sight. You were just being naturally curious, but I was being utterly stupid.” Mrs. McLachlan produced a clean handkerchief from her pocket and passed it over.

“But . . . could we use it?” Pandora brightened, suddenly struck with the possibility of helping Tarantella. “Your clock—could we go backward in time? To just before when Tarantella lost her leg? We could stop it from happening—”

Mrs. McLachlan took both of Pandora's hands in hers and drew a deep breath. “Child—you've just demonstrated the colossal danger of using the Alarming Clock. The answer to your question is no. No. Never. We cannot
ever
change the past, no matter how much we may wish to. We mustn't even allow our thoughts to stray in that direction, especially when we have the means to revisit the past in our possession. Can you understand what a perilous thing this clock is?” Pandora's puzzled expression drove Mrs. McLachlan to continue, “Try and think of it like this: if by using the clock, you could go back in time and undo one of the biggest evils of the past, then where would you start?”

With hardly any hesitation, Pandora plucked an atrocity from her sketchy memory of history lessons. “Um . . . Hiroshima. The atomic bomb. I'd try and undo that one.”

“And how would you do that?” Mrs. McLachlan prompted. “Stop the inventor of the atomic bomb from being born? But how would you propose to do that? Cause his mother to have a fatal accident before his birth? Smother him in his crib?”

“NO!” Pandora was outraged. “That would be
murder
.”

“Some would say an
insignificant
act of murder compared with the destruction wreaked by his invention. Let's try another scenario: perhaps you could sabotage the bomb, cause it to fall harmlessly into the sea instead of in the middle of a Japanese city?”

“Yes, that's a much better idea, but—” Pandora hesitated.

“Exactly. But.
But,
in a few years' time, the people who rely on that sea for their survival would be dying by the thousands, their livelihood contaminated, their unborn children damaged beyond medical repair. And maybe—who knows?—one of those children, but for the bomb that fell in the sea, might have grown up to become the greatest peacemaker in the history of the planet. What appears to be a simple black-and-white puzzle is, in reality, a minefield etched in varying shades of gray. What we would call a moral labyrinth.”

“Um . . . ahhh . . .” To Pandora's annoyance, language was deserting her.

“Listen to me, child. The Alarming Clock is not a plaything. It is a powerful and dangerous tool. It was designed to be used for seeing into the future, and thus to return to the present forewarned. That's exactly what you and your brother did—” The nanny held up her hands to forestall Pandora's attempt to deny Titus's involvement. “I
know
you both used it, and I'm beginning to wonder if it was something that Titus witnessed with the Alarming Clock that caused him to pass on his inheritance to that thug. A brave attempt to avoid the fate you both foresaw outlined for him. However . . . certain rules of conduct apply to those who use the Alarming Clock, and one of them is always to carry spare batteries.”

Pandora looked down at her hands and blushed.

“Another rule,” the nanny continued, “is no messing. No tweaking of the past or the future. No minor adjustments. No leaving of litter and no taking of souvenirs. You children have no idea how narrowly you missed destroying everything you love.”

“But then why have
you
—?” Pandora's voice was very small and frightened.

“Why have I got the Alarming Clock?” Mrs. McLachlan stood up and extended a hand to help Pandora to her feet. “I needed something to protect you children from that—fiend.” She nodded toward the hallway, where Fiamma d'Infer's slumped body was just visible from the drawing room. “I wanted to borrow a shield, but all I could get was an Alarming Clock.”

Pandora's mouth opened, and she managed half a question before a frown from Mrs. McLachlan made her halt in mid-sentence.

“Dear child”—the nanny smiled, shaking her head slowly—“you have the most inquiring mind it has ever been my plea-sure to encounter. Most people sleepwalk through their entire lives, their minds deliberately closed to the millions of possibilities open to them. Your parents and your brother are hardly aware of anything that goes on outside the limits of their own heads. But you and Damp are both explorers, your compasses permanently fixed on some distant star—your bags packed, and your little boats gently rocking at anchor—ready at any time to set sail for uncharted territories. For now, think of the Alarming Clock and where it came from as places that aren't on a map. You've heard rumors that they exist, but either they're too far away for your little boat to reach, or the seas are too unpredictable. And thus, for now, you have to wait and dream of a day when you find the map, or build a bigger boat—or even come on board with a more experienced navigator.”

Gazing into Mrs. McLachlan's shining eyes, Pandora was reminded of the old chart downstairs in the map room, the one hanging over the mantelpiece with illegible writing and “here beye monsteres” written in the fading script of a long-dead ancestor. Titus hadn't given it a second glance, his attention as ever focused on his computer screen in preference to the larger world beyond his eyes. Mrs. McLachlan picked her way around the sleeping witches to the window where Lucifer lay snoring on the polished floorboards. She bent down and removed the cell phone from his unresisting hand. Pandora watched as Mrs. McLachlan stood up, took aim, and hurled the offending object through a gap in the bramble thicket. The phone flew through the air and plunged with a splash into the mud at the bottom of the moat, giving out a small eruption of bubbles that meant its circuitry had been fatally flooded with moat-water.

“There,” the nanny said, dusting her hands and turning back to face Pandora. “That should do the trick.” She reached under Lucifer and retrieved his handgun, engaging the safety switch before tucking the weapon into the waistband of her skirt.

“Why not just get rid of it?” Pandora asked, then lowered her head into her hands in embarrassment. “There I go
again
—another question.”

“Because it might come in handy when we wake everybody up,” Mrs. McLachlan explained, nudging Lucifer with her foot. “
This
one doesn't understand anything unless it's accompanied by a gun. He's a nuisance, but he's nothing like as dangerous as the demon in the hall. Come on, let's get it over with, shall we?”

Twenty minutes later they emerged, soaked to the skin, from the waters of the moat. Lacking the tools to hack their way through the thorn-studded branches enveloping StregaSchloss, Pandora and Mrs. McLachlan had crawled through the partially flooded tunnels that ran beneath the house like a granite honeycomb, forming a link between the dungeons and the moat. Shivering, they ran across the meadow and halted at the foot of a rowan tree.

“Are you sure this will work?” Pandora peered up at the leafy branches, in some doubt as to whether such a fragile-looking tree could withstand the ferocity of a thwarted demon.

“It's the best I can think of right now.” Mrs. McLachlan began to tear rowan branches off the main trunk with an energy that belied her age. “And with a hefty sprinkling of salt, it might afford us some protection.”

Carrying Damp, who clutched a dog-eared picture book, Signora Strega-Borgia walked past Fiamma d'Infer with an astounding lack of curiosity as to why the demon resembled nothing so much as an oven-ready turkey. Trussed in a colorful selection of Pandora's tights and scarves, liberally sprinkled with salt, and surrounded by sprigs of greenery, Fiamma looked as if she were lacking only an accompaniment of roast potatoes in order to become the main course of Sunday lunch. Pandora and Mrs. McLachlan followed Baci and Damp into the drawing room, and all four resumed their positions on the sofa in front of the vase of roses.

“Ready?” Mrs. McLachlan paused, smiling broadly at Damp.

“
Now
what?” Signora Strega-Borgia inquired peevishly, wishing her own magic powers were less ineffectual.