Survivor (9 page)

Nerlin didn’t want to admit he knew nothing about all the stuff, so he decided to bluff.

‘So how about this then, eh?’ he said, taking
a bright yellow electric chainsaw off a shelf.

‘Very nice,’ said Mr Hulbert, who also didn’t want to admit he hadn’t the faintest idea what the thing was. ‘It looks very powerful.’

‘I should say so,’ said Nerlin, and pulled the starting cord.
²⁵

The chainsaw roared into life with such a loud scream that Nerlin dropped it. Unless you are in zero gravity, which neither Nerlin nor the chainsaw were, when you drop things they tend to fall downwards. And downwards was where Nerlin’s feet lived.

The chainsaw flapped around for a bit and then stopped. The reason it stopped was because it was jammed, and what it was jammed on was Nerlin’s ankle.

‘Oops,’ said Nerlin. He picked up his foot, which was now sitting under the workbench.

Mr Hulbert fainted.

‘It’s all right,’ said Nerlin. ‘It’s only one foot. I’ve got another one.’

Mr Hulbert said nothing on account of still being in a just-fainted situation. Nerlin picked him up and sat him in one of the old armchairs. Instinctively, even though two minutes ago he hadn’t known what an electric drill was, he plugged
a drill in, stuck a paintbrush in the chuck and turned it on. The bristles spun round, creating a draft of fresh air, which brought Mr Hulbert round.

‘Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?’ he spluttered.

‘No, you’ll be all right,’ said Nerlin. ‘Just take a few deep breaths.’

‘No, I mean your foot, er, all the blood…’ Mr Hulbert began as he felt himself going faint again.

‘No, it’s fine, I’m a wizard,’ said Nerlin and began mumbling a spell to himself. ‘See,’ he said as his foot re-joined itself to his body.

‘But, but,’ said Mr Hulbert, ‘shouldn’t it be on the end of your leg? It looks funny on top of your head.’

‘Just kidding,’ said Nerlin, wiggling his toes.

Mr Hulbert looked green.

Poor bugger
, Nerlin thought.
Humans have no sense of humour.

‘Here, this’ll make you laugh,’ he said and he
twisted his foot round and poked his big toe up his nose.

It didn’t make Mr Hulbert laugh. It made him faint again.

Nerlin fixed his foot back in the right place, got rid of all the blood and woke Mr Hulbert up again.

As he came round, Nerlin explained to him that the Floods were not like ordinary people. This was a very good time to tell someone as normal as Mr Hulbert something as big as this because fainting had made him very light-headed and ideas that might have frightened him at other times just slipped into his head now without a problem.

‘A wizard?’ he said. ‘You’re all wizards?’

‘Yes,’ said Nerlin.

‘Gosh,’ said Mr Hulbert. ‘I know a wizard.’

He was about to say, ‘Just wait until I tell all my friends,’ when he realised he didn’t actually have any friends apart from Mrs Hulbert, Ffiona and baby Claude, and they probably knew already.

‘So the elephant thing with my Ffiona really did happen?’ he said.

‘Absolutely,’ said Nerlin. ‘With my Betty as her friend, she need never worry about being bullied again.’

‘And all this stuff?’ Mr Hulbert asked, waving his arms round the shed. ‘Is this special wizard equipment?’

‘No, it’s all human stuff,’ said Nerlin. ‘I was kind of hoping you could tell
me
what it’s all used for.’

‘’Fraid not,’ said Mr Hulbert. ‘Though I think that thing there is a hammer and that might be a screwdriver.’

‘What do you do with them?’ said Nerlin.

‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Mr Hulbert. ‘I do know one thing, though. They’ve got nothing to do with stamp collecting.’

‘I suppose we better go and start the barbie,’ said Nerlin, whose entire barbecue knowledge consisted of two facts: it’s something blokes do, and it involves fire.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Hulbert, who knew slightly less about barbies than Nerlin.

‘We must do this again,’ said Nerlin as they left the shed.

‘Except maybe without the foot chopping off,’ said Mr Hulbert.

‘Yes,’ Nerlin agreed. ‘I’ve ruined a perfectly good sock.’

Mordonna and Mrs Hulbert were already doing the barbecue when their husbands got there. They were only too happy to let their husbands take over and went off to sit in the shade, although Mordonna wasn’t too happy about letting her husband near open flames because, ever since she had known him, Nerlin had always shown an unhealthy interest in news items that involved setting fire to things such as old ladies and big forests. If she had heard of the word ‘pyromaniac’ she would have thought Nerlin would make a very good one.

Nerlin flicked his cloak over his shoulder. Mr Hulbert took off his tie, and the two of them began poking things about with a pair of tongs and a poker.

‘Those two seem to be getting on like, er…’ Mordonna began. She was about to say ‘like a house on fire’, but thought it was probably tempting fate.

‘They do, don’t they,’ Mrs Hulbert agreed. ‘My Lionel is dreadfully shy normally, and I must say, I never thought I’d see the day when he would
be seen in public without his tie on. It’s quite exciting.’

Exciting is different for everyone. Some people can only get excited by jumping out of a plane above Niagara Falls standing on a surfboard with a paper bag over their heads and one arm tied behind someone else’s back. Other people like to ride horses across wide open plains towards golden sunsets and yet others like to boldly go where no one has gone before to discover wonderful new worlds, plants and fishes and frogs.

And then there are people like the Hulberts.

Mr Hulbert could find excitement in a new box of stamp hinges and Mrs Hulbert felt her heart go all of a flutter when she saw her husband standing on the other side of the Floods’ lawn without his tie on and the smoke from the barbecue wafting around him, making him look, to his wife’s timid imagination, a little bit like a primeval caveman.

‘It makes him look ten years younger,’ she said and undid the top button of her blouse.

This was not particularly wicked as she had fifteen other buttons – nineteen if you included the cuff s
²⁶
– that were still firmly done up, but it was enough to make Mr Hulbert’s pulse race when he glanced across and saw her.

‘This food’s taking ages to cook,’ said Nerlin. ‘Think I’ll go and have a look in my shed for something to put on the fire.’

Ancient inherited memories of his ancestors dancing naked with no clothes on while they set large parts of Belgium on fire stirred deep in Nerlin’s soul as he scoured the shed for some seriously dangerous accelerants. And finally he saw it: a big bright red can with a danger sign on the side, and the word ‘Petrol’.

‘That’ll get the cucumber sandwiches crispy,’ he said as he ran back across the lawn.

His mother-in-law, Queen Scratchrot, woke up in her coffin by the clothesline. She stretched her arms and her left hand poked up out of the
lawn at the precise moment that Nerlin’s right foot passed by.

He flew through the air, the petrol can flying ahead of him in a dead straight line towards the barbecue. Of course the top came off the can too, otherwise this would be a lot more boring.

So instead of a small egg-cupful of petrol on the fire to help things along a bit, seven litres splashed everywhere and there was a very big explosion.

This is what happened to the various people in the garden.

Baby Claude Hulbert shot up into the air and landed in a tree, followed by Satanella. After Satanella had helped him down he began to cry because he wanted to do it again.

Queen Scratchrot got a burning cinder down the feeding tube Mordonna poured her rat-tail soup into. Not realising the cinder wasn’t her dinner, the Queen ate it and asked for seconds.

Mordonna and Mrs Hulbert both had to go inside and brush the ash out of their hair.
Mrs Hulbert also had to pick three slices of hot cucumber out of her blouse.
²⁷

Valla had to rush up to his room and give himself a fresh coat of white paint to cover the soot stains.

Merlimary blew a fuse, but fortunately the fuse was in the local powerstation so it didn’t do her any harm.

Twelve cockroaches who had just moved into a nice tin can that had rolled under the barbecue were totally fried.

Betty and Ffiona were unharmed as they had been inside in the kitchen eating Zabaglione ice-cream.
²⁸

All the food got totally wrecked, which was probably a good thing considering they were cooking it in engine oil instead of vegetable oil.

And last, but the opposite of least, Nerlin and Mr Hulbert took the full force of the sausage explosion.
²⁹
They were thrown across the garden in a shower of burnt meat and fried onions and landed in a dazed but delicious-smelling heap by the back door.

‘Oops,’ said Nerlin.

‘Are we dead?’ said Mr Hulbert. ‘Have we gone to heaven? It smells like heaven except there’s no tomato sauce.’

Betty and Ffiona rushed out of the kitchen and helped their dazed dads to their feet.

‘I think I’d like to lie down,’ said Nerlin and lay down.

‘Why is the world spinning round like that?’ said Mr Hulbert and fell over on top of him.

‘Why don’t you both go and lie down in the … umm, err, nice cool relaxy place downstairs
with the nice soft relaxy beds?’ said Betty. ‘Come on.’

What she meant to say was, ‘Why don’t you both go and lie down in Valla’s special mortuary in two of his lovely padded coffins,’ but she realised that the idea of lying in an open coffin in a dark room might scare the living daylights out of someone like Mr Hulbert.

‘You know, Father, Valla’s special room,’ she said. She took the two men down to the cellar, tucked them up in two coffins with a couple of shrouds to keep them warm and turned out the light.

‘There you are. Have a nice peaceful rest,’ she said and went back upstairs.

There were four other coffins in the darkened cellar and one of them was already occupied. Neither the two dads nor their daughters realised this.

With the two husbands out of the way, the two mothers cooked a new batch of sausages and cucumber sandwiches on the barbie and got on like a house on fire, which is a stupid expression because it means they were both either burnt to the ground, or drenched from head to foot with a fire hose. Neither of these two things happened to them, though the first one did happen to the barbecue when the cucumber sandwiches caught fire because Mordonna had used engine oil on some of them when she had run out of butter.

‘I kept telling Dad you don’t make barbecues
out of wood,’ said Winchflat, ‘but he said it looked so much nicer than metal.’

‘Oh well,’ said Mordonna, poking around in the ashes to see if any of the sausages had survived, ‘we’ve still got the cucumber sandwiches.’

They went back indoors and ate the sandwiches, which Mordonna and her children thought were a bit lifeless, but Mrs Hulbert thought were very sophisticated because she’d never had sandwiches with the crusts cut off before.

‘It’s a wicked waste of food,’ her mother had always told her. ‘And as everyone knows, crusts are really good for you.’

Mordonna had sprinkled some of her relaxing-with-witches powder in the tea and the cucumber sandwiches and now Mrs Hulbert was feeling more relaxed than she had done since she had been three days old and fast asleep.

‘Would you like me to make an upside-down cake?’ Mrs Hulbert said. ‘Seeing as how the sausages were ruined.’

‘That would be nice,’ said Mordonna. ‘I haven’t made one of those since I was a girl. I’d forgotten all about them … hooking your feet over the beam in the castle kitchen and hanging upside down over the table with your wand between your teeth and trying to stop your skirt falling up over your face.’

‘I don’t think my mother’s recipe is quite the same as that…’ Mrs Hulbert began, but Mordonna was already collecting bowls and spoons.

She flashed her wand at the ceiling and a large wooden beam appeared, stretching from one end of the kitchen to the other.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘tuck your skirt into your knickers, you can go first. I’ll give you a lift up and make sure you don’t fall into the mixing bowl.’

‘I, umm, no, I, err…’

‘Go on, Mum,’ said Ffiona.

‘Oh, what the flip,’ said Mrs Hulbert.
³¹

She tucked her skirt into her thick navy blue undies and climbed up onto the table. Mordonna grabbed her round the waist, flipped her upside down and hooked her feet over the beam.

‘Here, you can use my Cooking Wand,’ said Mordonna. ‘Start stirring and I’ll conjure up the ingredients.’

She picked up her Shopping Wand and began waving it in the air. A bag of flour appeared from nowhere and poured itself into the bowl. Six very confused chickens suddenly materialised on the draining board and laid six eggs, which cracked themselves into the bowl.

‘Not so fast, dinner,’ Mordonna blurted out as the chickens began to disappear.

In a flash of an eye and far too quick to be painful, four of the chickens plucked themselves and jumped into the freezer as more ingredients decided they had spent too long on the shelves of the local supermarket.

Hanging from the beam, Mrs Hulbert felt the blood rushing to her head. As she spun the wand round in the mixing bowl, the room began to spin too and she felt her feet losing their grip on the beam. Finally she could hold on no longer and went crashing down into huge mixing bowl. As she did, Mordonna did the special upside-down cake twist with her wand and Mrs Hulbert ended sitting
the right way up right in the middle of the cake mixture.

‘Perfect cake-flip,’ said Mordonna. ‘I’ve never seen a first-timer do it so well.’

Mrs Hulbert sat with the cake mix oozing into all her nooks and crannies, not quite sure what to think. When she’d got up that morning, she’d been a bit apprehensive about visiting the Floods. She had thought they might be offered weird things to eat or be asked to wear pointy witch hats. One of the millions of things she hadn’t thought of was that she might end up sitting with her bottom in a huge bowl of cake mix. If someone had told her this was a possibility, she would have stayed at home and had to lie down in a dark room with a wet hankie on her forehead.

But now, she was amazed to find that she had a huge grin on her face. She felt as if a door had opened and she had walked out of her grey home into a world full of bright colours where anything was possible.

‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

‘Well, you go upstairs and have a shower while I put the cake in the oven,’ said Mordonna. As Mrs Hulbert stepped down onto the floor, where Claude and Satanella were licking as much cake mixture off her legs as they could reach, Mordonna added, ‘How many socks were you wearing, one or two?’

These are two typical witches’ knees

‘Two,’ said Mrs Hulbert.

‘Oh well, too late now,’ said Mordonna. ‘It can be like a lucky rat’s foot in a Christmas pudding.
³²
Whoever finds it will get a prize.’

After her shower Mrs Hulbert came downstairs in one of Mordonna’s dresses that was rather revealing, but she was in the sort of mood where she felt quite excited by it. No one apart from Mr Hulbert had ever seen her knees before, and Mr Hulbert had only seen them on special occasions like his birthday.

‘Don’t you have lovely knees,’ said Mordonna. ‘Mine are all bony. I wish they were like yours.’

‘But if you can do magic,’ said Mrs Hulbert, ‘can’t you change your knees to be exactly how you want them?’

‘I suppose I could, but Nerlin loves my knees as they are,’ Mordonna explained. ‘He says they remind him of the day we met. I fell down a hole,
you know, and landed right on top of him. He had two bruises from my knees right in the middle of his back for weeks.’

‘Mum, do you think me and Ffiona should go and wake our dads up?’ said Betty.

‘No, it’s nice and peaceful,’ said Mordonna. ‘We’ll just let them sleep.’

Which would have been fine except that the thing that had been sleeping in the other occupied coffin had just woken up. It was Winchflat’s latest invention, the thing that he had been secretly creating for the past fortnight.

Winchflat Flood had developed a taste for old-fashioned movies and his favourite was
Frankenstein
. He particularly liked the scenes where the mad doctor created a living creature out of a pile of bits from dead people, including a crazy murderer.

The trouble was, Winchflat didn’t realise the movie was a made-up story. He thought it was a documentary and that it had all really happened. Humans would realise it wasn’t true straight away, but Winchflat was a wizard and his father had
told him stories about growing up in Transylvania Waters, where it was not that unusual to make new people out of the bits of dead ones. There were even specialist upmarket mad doctors who would create creatures to order, and Winchflat’s grandfather King Quatorze had had a servant made with three heads all programmed to tell him how wonderful he was.

So naturally, having seen the
Frankenstein
movie, it was obvious that Winchflat would want to create a living-dead playmate of his own. This is what was sleeping in the other coffin:

Igorina was mostly male apart from the bits that weren’t. The bits that weren’t were mostly female apart from the bits that weren’t. The other bits were an assortment of Lego, wire, string and cardboard. Winchflat had searched through the rubbish bins behind the undertakers to see if there were any old body parts there, but all he found was a finger. It
wasn’t until he was leaving that he realised he’d been searching in the burger bar’s rubbish bin.

‘You have simply no idea how difficult it is to get bits of dead body in this town,’ Winchflat explained later. ‘I mean, humans are so wasteful. You go to a funeral parlour or a hospital and ask for a simple thing like an arm and they freak out. The ridiculous thing is that they would rather burn them or bury them in the ground than use them again. It’s such a waste.’

Winchflat knew that very few girls are attracted to skinny green-skinned boys with dead eyes, even if they do have enormous feet – unless, of course, they are Goth girls, and he didn’t like Goths. They looked just too healthy. So he realised he was very unlikely to get a proper girlfriend, and might have end up marrying Igorina. Because of this he thought of Igorina as a girl even though she was less than twenty percent female.

After he had created her in his special secret laboratory, Winchflat had carried Igorina down to his coffin cellar to sleep.

Now she had woken up.

‘AAHHHHHHHH,’ she groaned and then, ‘UURRRGGGHHHHH.’

‘What?’ said Nerlin.

‘Eh?’ said Mr Hulbert. ‘What did you say?’

‘I didn’t say anything. I thought it was you,’ said Nerlin.

‘OOOOOHHHHHHH.’

‘Who’s there?’

Most wizards, even ones like Nerlin who weren’t much good at magic, can rub their fingers together like two sticks and make them glow in the dark. Nerlin held up his hands and there was Igorina sitting up in her coffin.

‘Dada,’ she said, looking at Nerlin and grinning.