Pure Dead Magic (3 page)

“Count Dracula,” interrupted Mrs. McLachlan, “you have retrieved your teeth, I trust? Your fangs are back in the fold? Will we see you for a bite to eat later on?”

“Very funny,” muttered Titus, glaring at his shoes and avoiding eye contact with this intruder.

“Titus …,” warned his mother.

Slowly, as if he was wading through molasses wearing tennis rackets on his feet, Titus dragged himself across the carpet and extended a nail-bitten hand to shake. Mrs. McLachlan’s hand felt warm and soft, a definite improvement on the clammy-fish, nervous-nanny handshakes that Titus had been forced to endure of late. He risked a quick look. Mrs.
McLachlan’s eyes met his and immediately crinkled up in a many-wrinkled smile. Titus shut his eyes like a clam and inwardly vowed never to grow old. He retrieved his hand and used it to readjust his slipping fangs.

“When could you start, Mrs. McLachlan?” asked Signora Strega-Borgia.

“I already have, dear,” said Mrs. McLachlan, patting the slumbering Damp.

“But your clothes? Personal effects?”

“Och, don’t you worry about me, dear. I have everything I need in my bag.”

Something smells decidedly fishy, thought Latch, nobody travels
that
light.

“That’s it, is it?” demanded Pandora. “You’re not even going to pretend to ask us if
we
like her?”

“You might have asked, you know,” added Titus reproachfully. “I mean, I know we don’t pay her or anything, but we do count, don’t we?”

“
We’re
the ones that’ll have to spend all our time with her while
you
vanish off to Broomstick Craft at the Institute of Advanced Spelling or whatever,” spat Pandora, fixing her mother with a look that could burn toast.

Signora Strega-Borgia groaned. Titus and Pandora had become decidedly prickly since their father had left, and though Signora Strega-Borgia was becoming accustomed to their verbal spats, she found it deeply embarrassing to engage in all-out warfare in front of strangers, even if the strangers did invite one to call them Flora. “Latch, would you show Nanny to the nursery while I have a word with the children? Do excuse us for a moment, Mrs. McLachlan.”

“Call me Flora, dear.”

Trailing in their mother’s wake, Titus and Pandora followed her along the corridor and out into the light of the kitchen garden. Birds sang, bees droned, and a distant lawnmower stuttered, coughed, and stalled. The brightness of the sunlight made Titus screw up his eyes and scowl fiercely. She’s going to tell us that Times Are Hard, thought Titus. Again. And how We All Have to Make Allowances. Again.

Pandora glared at the bald baby rat she’d unpicked from her dress. Bet your mother doesn’t drag
you
out into the garden for A Word with the Children, thought Pandora, bet she just bites your ear and tells you to get on with chewing electrical cables.

“Do you have to be quite so obnoxious?” hissed Signora Strega-Borgia. When no answer came, she dug deep in her pockets and produced a pair of pruning shears. Picking on an innocent bay tree, she continued, “Every single nanny.”
SNIP!
“Not a smile, not even an attempt to be civil.”
SNIP!
“You’ve made it perfectly plain …”
SNIP!
“…  that you’d rather they all just dropped dead.”
SNIP!
“What’s so awful about this one?”
SNIP!

“She’s … old?” said Titus.

“So’s Strega-Nonna,” said Signora Strega-Borgia, attacking the bay with renewed venom.

“But she’s in the freezer and she’s part of the family,” said Titus, desperately trying to think of more reasons not to hire Mrs. McLachlan, “and besides, Mrs. McLachlan’s
boring.
She won’t know anything about computers, and she’ll think magic is some kind of oven cleaner.”

“Precisely,” snapped Signora Strega-Borgia, waving her shears for emphasis. “The
last
thing this family needs is Nanny
Magic or Nanny Modem. What we need is an ordinary, straightforward, bedtime-at-nine and brush-your-teeth-a-hundred-times kind of nanny. And
that
is what we’re about to get.”

“I don’t want a nanny,” said Pandora in a very small voice. The baby rat squeaked. Large, salty wet things were dripping on its bald head. “I don’t want you to have to go out to work. I don’t want you and Dad to get divorced. I want everything to be like it was before.…”

Titus stared fixedly into the middle distance. Pandora had given voice to his deepest fear—she’d even
said
the D-word. His nose prickled and his vision blurred. No one had mentioned divorce before.… He silently willed his sister to stop. Whatever she was saying, he didn’t want to hear it.

“Oh my poor Pan,” said Signora Strega-Borgia drawing her daughter close and reaching for Titus’s hand. “I know this is a horrible time for you both—you’re missing your father dreadfully.…”

Pandora looked up into her mother’s face. In a voice devoid of any hope whatsoever, she said, “But do
you
miss Dad?”

Titus froze. Pandora had done it again. Somehow she’d reached into his head and plucked out the very question he didn’t dare think about, far less
say.
His breath turned to ice in his lungs.

Signora Strega-Borgia’s face crumpled, her eyes spilling tears and her mouth turning into a downward curve of anguish. “Yes,” she whispered, “every moment of every day. Every breath I take.…” Her self-control dissolved in a flood of tears.

Titus exhaled in relief. Pandora’s eyes shone. Signora
Strega-Borgia hugged her children tight and in return four arms held her close and four hands patted her shoulders, stroked her face, and wiped away her tears. Unnoticed, the baby rat made a bolt for freedom, loudly squeaking its disapproval of bipeds that leak.

A Little Bit of Damp

D
amp was impressed. This new nanny could change a mean diaper, sing a tuneful (if wobbly) lullaby, and didn’t slobber at all when dishing out kisses. She’d watched Mrs. McLachlan folding diapers and undershirts and had noted with approval the new nanny’s command of nursery etiquette. Teddies were stacked neatly on shelves, books were arranged in diminishing order of height, and all broken toys were placed in a basket for future repair. Damp’s tummy was full, her diaper dry, and her head happily full of recently read stories. Now, Mrs. McLachlan sat in a sunlit corner of the nursery and mended socks.

Unobserved, Damp crawled purposefully toward Mrs. McLachlan’s handbag. She pulled at a corner of the bag and it slowly toppled over, spilling some of its contents on the nursery floor. The baby sat back on her bottom and began to explore.

There was a book of the kind that Bigs read, no pictures, lots of pages; no, don’t want that,
toss.
There was a lipstick in a cracked plastic tube; no, did lipstick earlier, don’t want that,
fling.
There was a case that hummed quietly to itself. Intrigued, Damp reached out to pick it up. It felt warm as it vibrated gently in her hands. Turning it over—all the better to investigate—Damp unwittingly undid the latch. The case opened, exposing the keyboard within. Ahh. A piano thing, thought Damp, prodding the keys.

QWERTYUIOP
appeared on the screen, followed by a prompt
EXCUSE ME
?

Damp pressed on, and produced !@£$%^&&&; unknown to her, the case responded,
I DON
…
T
THINK
SO
.

To Damp’s astonishment, the background hum turned into a loud shriek. Damp dropped the case and did what any sensible baby would do under the circumstances. She threw back her head, opened her mouth, and howled.

It worked. Mrs. McLachlan responded instantly. “You poor wee thing. What’s the matter, pet? Did something in Nanny’s bag bite you?”

Damp flapped at the piano thing, now appearing to be having a temper tantrum on the shiny floorboards.

“Ah.” Mrs. McLachlan paled. “You’ve met Nanny’s makeup case. And my heavens, it’s having hysterics.…” She picked up the case and pressed a key. Instantly the shrieks stopped, the lid snapped shut, and the faint humming sound resumed. “It won’t harm you. Really. Let’s put it away, out of sight, out of mind, shall we, and Nanny’s book and her lipstick, then you can show me round your house? You lead with the crawl and I’ll follow doing the breaststroke.”

Damp set off, followed by Mrs. McLachlan.

Night drew in at StregaSchloss. The wood pigeons fell silent, the air grew cool, and in the kitchen garden, the snipped bay tree wept tears of sap. A trickle of wood smoke from the Schloss chimneys slowly dwindled to a thin line, etching a message of embers and ash across the night sky. Bats flittered out from their attic roost, their wings beating a leathery tattoo through the mist rolling in from the sea loch.

In the stillness of the moat, Tock ate an ornamental goldfish by way of a nightcap, belched a series of underwater bubbles, and dozed, dreaming of nannies and one-armed pirate snacks.

In the Schloss kitchen, Marie Bain, the French cook, blew her nose, examined the result in her handkerchief, and sneezed wetly into tomorrow’s soup. She turned out the lights, hunched her shoulders closer to her scrawny neck, and sneaked along the passage and upstairs to her meager attic bedroom. In her stained apron she carried three cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and two cookbooks, in case sleep was slow in arriving and famine struck in the hours before dawn.

In the dungeons below the moat, lumbering shapes wheezed and scratched. Chains rattled, clanked, and were still. In the background, a steady drip of water on stone tapped out the nighttime like a subterranean clock.

In the wine cellar, a large freezer ticked and hummed. Deep within, in her bed of permafrost, Strega-Nonna dreamt of polar bears, creaking icebergs, and of the luminous shifting curtain of the aurora borealis.

Upstairs, propped up on pillows, soundly asleep in a full-length white nightgown, Mrs. McLachlan snored. She slept too
deeply to hear the traffic of fat little knees and hands, padding across the nursery floor in search of comfort.

Damp had awoken to see silent fingers of mist pressed against the windows of the nursery. It was as if the sea loch had risen out of its bed and come to visit the Schloss, to peer in the windows and gaze damply at the sleepers within. She felt cold. She poked teddy after teddy through the bars of her crib and, using her activity center as a step, vaulted over the top rail and crash-landed onto the teddy mat below.

The corridor between the nursery and Signora Strega-Borgia’s bedchamber was long and dark. Damp crawled by Braille, feeling her way along the carpet till she reached her destination. She paused in the doorway and removed several dustballs from her pajamas, then crawled full speed into the bedroom. With an effort, Damp hoisted herself onto her mother’s bed and tunneled under the sheets to reach the sleeping mummy summit.

“Bog off, Damp,” groaned Pandora. “Take your foot
out
of my nose.”

Damp climbed over Pandora and poked the next sleeping body hopefully.

“Horrible baby,” said Titus. “Take your diaper
off
my face.”

Ignoring her siblings, Damp pried her mother’s eyelids apart to check if she really was asleep. Two bloodshot eyes glared at her.

“You’re hogging the quilt,” complained Titus.

“I’m about to fall off the edge of the bed,” whined Pandora.

“For heaven’s sake!” exploded Signora Strega-Borgia. “Whose bed is this, anyway?”

Damp smiled into her mother’s face and settled happily in
the middle of the bed. Her mother sighed. It was obvious that the baby thought that the bed belonged to her. Signora Strega-Borgia smoothed the quilt over Pandora’s shoulder, tucked a wayward strand of hair behind Titus’s ear, and curled herself around Damp’s small body. Around her, the children slept, safe in her bed, just as they had done since their father had disappeared. And just as she had done for the previous twenty-one nights, Signora Strega-Borgia lay awake staring at the ceiling, tears tracking silently down her face as she wondered for the millionth time where her husband had gone.

Where on Earth?

I
n a gray prison cell, a long way from home, Signor Luciano Strega-Borgia, father to Pandora, Titus, and Damp, temporarily estranged husband of Signora Baci Strega-Borgia, woke up with a shriek. “AAAAAAARGH!” And then, for he had a headache of monumental nastiness, “Aaaa … oww … shhhhhhhh.”