Pure Dead Magic (13 page)

He sat down heavily in the chair in front of his computer and began to type a message to his father.

He pressed
ENTER
, but nothing happened. He pressed it again, but still nothing. No reassuring
MESSAGE SENT
box, just his own letter hanging there on the blue screen.

“Oh GREAT!” yelled Titus. “Just what I need. Come on. Do it for me. Just this once.
Please.
”

Unknown to Titus, inside the modem a minute speck of fly wing dropped by the outgoing Tarantella lay across a vital part of the circuitry. This was causing Titus’s message to pause in its journey, shriek to a halt, perform a speedy U-turn and head back to base with the happy news that the information superhighway was now blocked. Also unknown to Titus, this was one of those occasions when a swift thwack to the modem would have solved the problem. However, Titus had been brought up to seek logical solutions rather than those of brute force. In vain, he opened files, scrolled through Help directories, and trawled through computer manuals before laying his head on the keyboard and conceding defeat.

His sister was lost, his mother drunk, and his father unreachable. Concluding that there was nothing more that
he
could do, Titus loaded
Death & Destruction II
and began to plan his assault on Nettlefold.

Tarantella Does the Biz

R
outed from stregaschloss.co.uk to [email protected], Damp had one brief glimpse of her father’s face before being whizzed off to the Web site for The Really Authentic Italian Food Company, known to its many clients worldwide as spag.bol@mamma.

Here was the place where you logged on to order pasta by the square mile. Here was where you could, should you wish, order up a pizza the size of the Coliseum.

Damp huddled in a corner of a monitor and looked out. Launched onto the Internet before lunchtime, she was now extremely hungry. The sight of so much food reminded her that she’d missed a meal. Wishing to share this discovery, she pressed her face up against the glass of the screen and began to grizzle. This failed to produce the desired result. No one scooped her up and bore her off to the kitchen, bib, and bowl. Damp turned up her volume a bit. Nobody noticed. Resorting
to desperate measures, Damp flung herself around, thrashing her arms and legs, and uttered a brain-curdling shriek. Unfortunately, since she was the size of an atom, her best efforts were little louder than a whisper.

Her tiny body connected with an outgoing e-mail, and before she could blink, she found herself once more hurtling along the information superhighway like a human tumble-weed. Damp closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and howled. She whizzed along telephone wires, under the sea, along deep-sea communication cables, and occasionally was bounced up into outer space via satellites. Lights flashed past, electricity hummed, and computers shrieked like strangulated peacocks. Damp was thoroughly dizzy and deafened. Abruptly she came to a near standstill. She swung back and forth, at first in a wide arc, and then slower and slower in decreasing swings till finally she came to a complete halt.

A voice spoke. A friendly, furry, almost familiar voice. “Damplette!” it said. “Little Dampy-Pops! She of the diapered derriere. Oh, the
trouble
I’ve had trying to find you. I’ve been to banks in Bogotá, nuclear bunkers in Nevada, supermarkets in Surrey, and it was by sheer chance that I fancied some fettuccine with flies for lunch and found you here.… My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to return you to your siblings who, even as we dangle here on the World Wide Web, are sitting weeping, willing your safe return, wailing, and waiting to welcome you home.”

Damp opened her eyes for a quick peek at the owner of the voice. Overhead, a gigantic spider smiled down at her. Damp instantly squeezed both eyes shut.

“Awww. C’mon, small,” Tarantella coaxed. “I
know
I’ve got
eight legs and probably more hair than you’ve had in your lifetime, but really, I’m on
your
side.” She patted Damp’s head reassuringly.

Damp flinched and squeezed her eyes even tighter shut.

“Oooh, baby,” crooned Tarantella, “how about a lullaby?”

Damp burst into tears.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Sorrysorrysorry,” cried Tarantella. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. Don’t cry, you’ll short-circuit the Web. C’mon, pet, just think of me as a black woolly rug, and climb on board.…”

A little howl escaped Damp’s lips.

“Oh dear. Desperate measures for desperate times,” muttered Tarantella, beginning to spin.

Damp sat, eyes squinched shut, mouth compressed to a rosebud pucker, trying to ignore the fact that she was being steadily wrapped in spider silk.

“The problem with the younger generation …,” panted Tarantella as she spun around the baby, “…  is that you still buy into that Miss Muffet stuff. Haven’t you heard of
Charlotte’s Web,
or
James and the Giant Peach?
” She stood back to admire her handiwork. “Purrfect,” she crooned, tucking the silk-swaddled baby under one leg. “And now …”

She stepped backward, onto the cyberspace equivalent of the
fast lane, and was immediately swallowed up in traffic. “WHEEEEEEEE!”

They crossed continents, traversed oceans, and navigated through outer space, and one hour later, at an indecent speed, were bounced into StregaSchloss. Crawling out of the modem and into the CD-ROM, Tarantella paused in the drawer and listened.

She could make out two voices. The one belonging to Titus sounded breathless and scared. The other, unknown, sounded aggressive and very close at hand. It said, “
Buon giorno,
Titus. Your uncle Lucifer sends you this greeting.” A loud bang and a scream convinced the spider that she should stay where she was. Chewing thoughtfully on the speck of fly wing that she had dropped on her outward journey, Tarantella looked down at her cocooned charge. Damp was oblivious to her surroundings and had fallen asleep during the journey home. The spider was no stranger to motherhood, even if the child appeared to be short of six legs. She patted Damp with a hairy leg, hugged her closer, and settled down to wait until it was safe to emerge. Beneath her, the circuitry in the computer sprang to life. Without a manual or even a Help directory, Tarantella had fixed Titus’s computer problem. She’d simply eaten it.

A Gory Bit

N
o sounds penetrated the walls of the dungeon at StregaSchloss. It was here, amid the restful drip of water on stone, that Latch frequently took his afternoon nap. Stretched out on a pile of straw, with the day’s paper across his face, he was blissfully unaware that StregaSchloss was under siege.

Nearby, Sab was too involved with his own discomfort to notice anything amiss. His stomach growled and rumbled, trying vainly to digest the previous night’s smocked hiccup.

In a far corner, Ffup groaned in his sleep. The dragon had staggered back to his bed in the dungeon, aware that he might be in disgrace after his earlier bombing mission had buried a visitor to StregaSchloss under a mound of green goo.

On Sab’s return dungeonward, he’d found Tock on the Schloss doorstep, polishing off the remains of Ffup’s goo and complaining about the lumpy bits. The crocodile smacked his
lips and paused to remove machine-gun fragments from between his teeth. The shredded remains of a black suit littering the moatside seemed to indicate that Tock had found a pudding to follow his main course.

“Great sauce, this,” he had said, “but could we sieve out the metal bits next time?”

Just remembering this conversation was enough to make Sab’s stomach churn. Rolling his eyes to the ceiling, the griffin turned himself back into stone. Instantly all activity in his stomach ceased. A slow smile spread across his granite muzzle. His thoughts turned to mountaintops, to pebbles and basalt. Latch’s snores and the steady drip of water down the dungeon walls faded from the griffin’s consciousness.

A shadow fell across the bars of the open cage. A shadow cast by a figure dressed in black who was tiptoeing down the dungeon stairs. The figure muttered to himself, cursing as his feet slipped on the mossy stone and he found himself slithering down the remainder of the stairs on his bottom. He arrived at the foot of the stairs, gun clutched in both hands, eyes wide with terror. Staggering to his feet, he blinked in an attempt to see anything in the darkness. “What kind of a place is this?” he asked himself. The echo answered,
This? This? This?

Shifting his gun into one hand, he fumbled forward, using his other hand to feel along the walls. It wasn’t long before his trembling fingers found the granite griffin. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he could pick out individual features—the flared nostrils, the leonine mane, and the eyeballs frozen in their upward roll.

“The things people keep in their cellars,” he remarked,
peering closely at Sab. “Who in their right mind would want to hang on to an ugly brute like you, pal?”

You pal, you pal, you pal,
the echo agreed. Assuming incorrectly that the dungeon offered no threat whatsoever, the hireling tucked his gun in a holster under his armpit and leaned back against the griffin like someone waiting for a passing bus. Furthering this impression of a relaxed commuter, he dangled a cigarette between his lips and rooted in his jacket for a light. He found a single match wedged in the fluff at the bottom of a pocket and searched for a bit of dry stone to strike it on. Reaching upward, he dragged the match across Sab’s eyeball. As the match ignited, the griffin appeared to undergo a magical transformation from stone to battered leather. Leather that moved. Leather that reached downward, and with a brief crunch, neatly removed the hireling’s head and spat it across the dungeon. The head landed on the floor beside Latch, its severed nerves and sinews causing it to wink in a horribly lifelike fashion.

The remainder crumpled at the knees and pitched forward onto the dungeon floor. The lit match dropped from a lifeless hand and fizzled out on the floor. Latch awoke from a dream into a nightmare. Lifting the newspaper from his face, he found himself eyeball to eyeball with the head of a headless corpse. A trail of blood led to the corpse, which lay leaking gorily under the griffin. Sab looked up at the dungeon ceiling and tried to whistle.

Latch noted that the griffin’s mouth was suspiciously red and shiny. Bloody, in fact. “Sab?” Latch’s voice came out as a squeak. “What
have
you done?”

The griffin stopped whistling and looked down. “Aaaargh!”
he screamed. “Help! MURDER! Where did
that
come from?” He looked sideways at Latch to see how this was going down. Latch glared at him.

“It’s a put-up job!” wailed Sab. “I’ve been framed! I’m an innocent bystander! How could you believe that I could do such a thing?”

“Because you’ve got blood running down your chin,” Latch said grimly.

“Have I?” Sab patted his mouth. “Oh heck, so I have.…”

“Well?”
said Latch. “What happened?”

“He asked for it,” said the griffin, folding his arms and trying to look mean.

“What? He actually said, ‘Please, dear griffin, if you’re not doing anything too important, could you possibly bite my head off?’ “Latch began to lay pages of his newspaper on the floor in an attempt to mop up the blood.

“Well … not in so many words,” said Sab, avoiding eye contact. “But I knew he was Up to No Good. Check out the gun in his armpit. Really—you’d have done the same yourself.”

“Somehow, I very much doubt it,” Latch said under his breath. “Stay here. Don’t move a muscle. I’m going to find Mrs. McLachlan.”

As the sound of his footsteps faded away, Sab stood, as instructed, still as a statue. Leathery hide turned back into stone as the griffin retreated into the state from which he’d been so rudely interrupted. At his feet, the headless gangster resembled a human sacrifice, slain to appease the appetite of an unkind god.