Pure Dead Magic (14 page)

Chilled Attila

D
rooling in the kitchen garden, Knot decided that today was his lucky day. He peered through the kitchen window to check that It was really there. First the discovery of Marie Bain’s furry slippers discarded by the range, and now this.…

In the kitchen, Mrs. McLachlan remonstrated with the malodorous bunny as he tied her to a chair with a length of clothesline. “That knot will never do, dear,” she said. “Far too easy to undo. Try a double half-hitch-clove-hangman. Much more secure, don’t you think?”

“Shut up,” muttered the bunny, adding another granny knot to a chain of knots that dangled like loose knitting from Mrs. McLachlan’s hands.

“If you don’t mind me saying,
dear—
”

“I
do.
Shut up, would you?”

“It’s for your own good, dear. Something your mother forgot to tell you—”

“Shut up, woman, or I’ll gag you.”

“As I was trying to say, dear, you mustn’t shun soap and water. A bath once a day might not be amiss, either. Oh dear, how can I put this without causing offense? Could you not stand quite so close to me, dear, it’s just that you … smell rather strange.”

From the other side of the window, Knot nodded in agreement. Deliciously strange, he thought, rancidly yummy, in fact. With a little whimper of anticipation, the yeti burst into the kitchen, spraying a mist of drool around himself. The rabbit turned round just in time to see the yeti lumbering toward him, arms outstretched.

“WHAT the … ?” he screamed as Knot grabbed him with both paws, stuffed him headfirst into his dripping mouth, and poked his thrashing feet in afterward with both thumbs.

“Oh, Knot …,” said Mrs. McLachlan sadly. “How could you?”

The yeti gulped apologetically and gazed at Mrs. McLachlan with sorrowful eyes.

“After being so ill this morning, dear. You really should give your tummy time to recover.…”

The yeti gave a small belch and tried to look chastened. Mrs. McLachlan wriggled and squirmed in her seat. “We’ve got a problem at StregaSchloss, Knot,” she explained as she flexed and strained at the knotted clothesline. Her feet came undone, closely followed by both hands. “Unwelcome guests. My horoscope was quite right about that, except it isn’t lice, it’s a particularly vicious kind of rat.”

She stood up, the clothesline falling to the floor in coils. “There isn’t time to put down poison for this kind of rat, is there?”

The yeti shook his head in what he hoped was an intelligent fashion. He could have turned cartwheels for all the notice Mrs. McLachlan took of him.

“NO,” she said, opening her large handbag and rummaging in its depths. “No, Knot, we have to STAMP the vermin out. Eradicate them. Exterminate them. Wipe them off the face of the planet. There’s only one thing for it …”

Her eyes have gone all funny, Knot thought. Wish I knew what she was on about.

“We need to take them by surprise,” continued Mrs. McLachlan. “Can’t very well just barge in through the door, can we? They’d hear us coming.”

Turning her back on Knot to shield her secret from him, Mrs. McLachlan withdrew a small case from her handbag. I’m really left with no alternative, she decided, unclipping its lid to reveal the keyboard beneath. This situation is outside of my job description, and regrettably I
have
to use all the powers at my disposal to put it to rights. Even if those include the use of magic.

With a grim little smile, she scanned the kitchen for a suitable candidate for the case’s transformative powers. Deciding on the upright freezer, she opened its door and propped her case on top of a bag of frozen chicken legs. The exposed keyboard began to frost over. Mrs. McLachlan began to type:
F.R.E.E.Z.E.R.
Her fingertips left thawed impressions on the frosty keys. Pressing a key named
REPLACE
, she then typed:
S.E.C.R.E.T. P.A.S.S.A.G.E.
On a miniature screen on the reverse side of the open lid the prompt appeared:
FROM KITCHEN TO WHERE
?

Mrs. McLachlan didn’t hesitate. Her fingers a blur on the keyboard, she typed:
T.O. T.I.T.U.S.….S
.
B.E.D.R.O.O.M.

“Please, please, let this not bring the kitchen wall crashing
down around our ears,” Mrs. McLachlan begged, and holding her breath, she pressed ENTER, snatched her chilly case from the frozen embrace of the chicken legs, and slammed the freezer door shut. There was a muffled explosion, the sound of passages opening up in StregaSchloss where no passages existed before. There was a distant grinding noise and then silence, save for the dripping sound of Knot’s drool pattering on the kitchen floor. Hearing the sound of approaching footsteps from the direction of the dungeon, Mrs. McLachlan slipped the case into her pocket and hid in the pantry.

Latch ran into the kitchen, leaving a trail of bloody footprints across the floor. “Mrs. McL … Flora,” he hissed in a piercing whisper.

Multitudina bolted out of the pantry, followed by Mrs. McLachlan. She stared at the trail of blood behind the butler, took in his startled expression and pale face, and instantly understood.

“You have the look of a man who has just found something exceedingly nasty in the dungeon,” she stated.

“Sab beheaded somebody downstairs.” Latch shuddered. “It … he … he had a gun.”

“Knot ate the one that was tying me to a chair in the kitchen. He, too, had a gun.” Mrs. McLachlan swallowed. “We have a problem.”

“Several, I imagine,” Latch agreed.

“There’s probably more of them and they’re undoubtedly armed,” said Mrs. McLachlan, stroking the case in her pocket.

“Where are the children?” Latch’s voice rose to a shriek.

“That is what we’re going to find out,” muttered Mrs. McLachlan, opening the freezer door.

Inside, a narrow staircase wound its way upward into darkness. Knot stared after them in some confusion. Why keep a staircase in the freezer? he wondered dimly. And, more to the point, where did the chicken legs go? Also in a state of some confusion, Latch bleated, “Since when was there a secret pass …?” Mrs. McLachlan cut this short by dragging Latch by the hand into the transformed freezer and pushing him ahead of herself, upstairs.

Knot shuffled forward, sniffing Latch’s trail of bloody footprints more from habit than appetite. From upstairs came the faint stutter of gunfire. The door to the secret passage was shut firmly in his face.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

T
wo rolls of soggy toilet paper later, Pandora decided that she’d cried enough to last her entire lifetime. She quietly opened the bathroom door and sought refuge in her bedroom.

Finding her mother drunk and seeing her brother in tears had completely shattered her belief in her family. Nothing could ever be the same again. They had all been so happy … once upon a time.

Hadn’t they? Her parents had seemed to love each other, or was that just wishful thinking? Pandora needed reassurance desperately, she needed to see proof positive that there had been happiness, that they had been a family. Then, perhaps, she could find a path back to better times … a way to turn the clock back. She hunted along her bookshelves until she found a photograph album that she had shrunk earlier to the size of a thumbnail.

Clumsily leafing through the tiny book, she came across a
recent photograph taken on Damp’s first birthday. Peering at the minute picture, she could just about pick out the family group, their pinhead-sized faces gathered round a birthday cake the size of a crumb.

They all looked so small … so far away.

They’d been a family then, Pandora thought miserably, observing the microscopic smiles, the air of happiness that permeated the photograph. Two months ago. Only two months and a world can turn itself inside out and upside down. Two months ago, Dad was still around, Damp was just an ordinary-sized baby, and Mrs. McLachlan hadn’t moved in.… And now … this postage-stamp image was all that remained. Dad had gone, Mum was absent due to being drunk, Damp was lost, and Titus …

Pandora sighed. Titus, she decided, had lost himself in that blasted computer. When he wasn’t playing stupid games on it, he was
thinking
about playing stupid games on it. Pandora stood up. She pulled the last Disposawand from her pocket. A vague plan had begun to take shape in her mind. What if, she wondered with a wild grin flitting across her face, what if I
shrink
the computer? Then Titus won’t be able to play on it and he’ll have to do something about Dad and Mum and—Pandora’s face fell—and Damp. Bother. How do we get Tarantella and Damp back if the computer’s the size of a matchbox? Bother, bother.… Absently sucking the end of her wand, Pandora opened her bedroom door and sleepwalked out into the corridor, her mind full of a plan.

There
must
be a way to do this, she reasoned as she walked slowly toward Titus’s room. There
has
to be a way … shrink the computer, but YES! That’s IT! Keep the modem and the
CD-ROM the same size. YES, YES, YES, what a
brain,
Pandora, what a
star,
what a child
prodigy.
Pandora was so captivated by her own brilliance that she was through the door of Titus’s bedroom before she realized that he had a visitor. On reflection, she thought,
not
a visitor—an intruder.

Titus’s eyes met hers. In his gaze, Pandora read fear, pain, and utter misery. Without thinking, she raised her left hand and began to draw lazy circles in the air with her wand.

“Right, kid,” Pronto said, waving his gun. “Over here. Don’t make a squeak or your brother’s a human colander.”

“He means it,” muttered Titus. “Just do as he says, Pan.”

Pandora advanced on Pronto, her wand poised to cast the spell.

“And put that stick down,” added Pronto. “It’s making me nervous.”

“This old thing?” Pandora said innocently, gazing at the wand as if she’d just noticed it. “Here—catch!”

Titus flinched and braced himself. The wand flew through the air toward Pronto, who was completely taken aback. Reflexively he thrust out his gun to knock the wand out of the air. The wand and the gun made contact. There was a dazzling flash. Titus and Pandora reeled backward, their frazzled eyeballs temporarily out of order as afterimages of intense light seared their retinas. Blinking frantically, Pandora was first to sense that everything had not gone according to plan. Contrary to what she’d imagined when she cast her spell, Pronto was
not
holding a miniaturized firearm, capable only of immobilizing ladybugs and bruising crane flies.

Pronto gazed at his outstretched arm, a nasty grin stretching across his face. He no longer held a small machine gun. Instead, Pronto was stroking the oily barrel of the deadliest
automatic weapon known to man. So sophisticated, it didn’t have a trigger, it picked up signals from the user’s brain. So advanced, it didn’t have a telescopic sight, it had an infrared flesh-detector to locate and lock on to its target. Such a deadly weapon that its inventor had turned it on himself in a fit of remorse for having created such a lethal artifact. Its name was Wormwood and it lay hissing quietly in Pronto’s arms, its blind snout jerking from side to side as it located first Pandora and then Titus.

“Oh, well DONE,” Titus said bitterly. “What a GENIUS. What a STAR you are, sister dear.”

Pandora rubbed her eyes and glared at her brother. “It’s that wand,” she wailed. “I did everything right, but the
wand
didn’t work.”

“This old thing?” Pronto purred, picking up the fallen wand and examining it. “ ‘Contrawand,’ “he read, “ ‘reverses spells, undoes charms, and nixes hexes.’ Hang on, there’s something else in very small letters. ‘The manufacturers recommend six uses only before safe disposal as hazardous magical waste.’ ”

Pandora’s shoulders slumped.

“Well …?” demanded Titus.

“Actually,” admitted Pandora, “the wand worked perfectly.”

“I’ll second
that,
” gloated Pronto, patting Wormwood. From the gun came a ghastly sound like forks being dragged across a plate.

The children shuddered.

“Right,” Pronto continued, addressing Titus, “where were we before we were so
charmingly
interrupted? Ah yes, UP AGAINST THE WALL AND SAY YOUR GOODBYES.”