Floods 10 (11 page)

‘You're not taking him,' said Auntie Tremble. ‘He be just a little child.'

‘Well, I could try and force you out through the letterbox if you like,' said the Grime Reaper. ‘Except you're so fat you'd probably burst. Anyway, you have no choice.'

And with that Spudly was lifted into the air, sucked out of the cottage and whisked away to the Grime Reaper's special delivery service, which normally would have been a great noble eagle that could soar through the sky like a great noble eagle, but because the Grime Reaper was such a cheapskate, the bird was actually a very old half-bald vulture and soared through the air like a wet bag of porridge.

‘When the goblin has delivered his message, wait for a reply and bring him back here,' the Grime Reaper ordered.

‘You never said anything about it being reply paid,' said the vulture.

‘You bring him back and I'll let you eat him.'

Spudly wet himself. He did this just as the vulture lifted itself over the cottage roof, which meant that until he could shapeshift into something that could have a bath, the Grime Reaper would stink of goblin's wee.
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The vulture flew up towards the stars and smashed its head on the cave roof. It did this in three different parts of the cave until the Grime Reaper took control of it, throwing it at breakneck speed along a series of winding tunnels, crashing between stalactites, stalagmites and fossilised bones until it shot out into broad daylight halfway up the mountain that overlooked Dreary. Spudly had shut his eyes just before the vulture had first collided with the cave roof and not opened them since. Now that he could feel fresh air on his face, he opened one eye and then the other.

They were gliding over the forest behind Dreary towards the castle. Inside the vulture's head its tiny brain was being controlled by the Grime Reaper, who was looking through the bird's eyes to see exactly where it should land.

As it flew over the castle rooftops, it saw King Nerlin lying in the shadows with a bottle of factor minus-fifty bleach, working on his anti-suntan.

‘Land, land, land,' the Grime Reaper ordered and the vulture crashed into the wall above Nerlin, dropping Spudly right in his lap.

Nerlin was not used to having goblins dropped on him. It had never happened before. In fact, not only had he never even seen a goblin before, he actually thought they were just made up things in kids' books. So when he saw Spudly lying in his lap, he assumed the poor child was a wind-up toy.

‘One of those ones that wets itself,' he said as he sent a servant off to get him some dry trousers.

‘Sorry, Your Majesty,' said Spudly. ‘I always wees a bit when I'm frighted.'

‘What an amazing toy,' said Nerlin. ‘It talks
really well. Probably made in Taiwan.'

‘No,' said Spudly beginning to cry again. ‘I's not a toy. I'm a little boy.'

‘No, little boys are bigger than that,' said Nerlin. ‘You'd have to be a goblin to be that small and they're just made up in stories.'

‘Please, sir,' said Spudly. ‘Please, I aren't made up. I'm real.'

‘Not a toy?'

‘No.'

‘Not with batteries then?'

‘No. I am Spudly and I am a goblin.'

‘Wow,' said Nerlin.

‘And I have got a letter for you,' said Spudly.

Nerlin read the letter and went white, though that could have been the factor minus-fifty bleach, and sent for Mordonna, who read the letter but didn't go white because she was already incredibly white. They sent for Mr Hulbert and called Winchflat back from Summer School again and they all tried to decide what to do.

The letter said:

‘Can't you make a Grime Reaper Detector?' said Mordonna.

‘I've tried before when he escaped After you locked Auntie Howler up,' said Winchflat. ‘The trouble is, he seems to have some sort of magic aura that makes him invisible to any type of detecting equipment. Even when I used that pair of his old underpants that Howler wore in a locket round her neck, it didn't help.'

‘So what are our options?' Nerlin asked.

‘Would it be so bad to set her free?' said Mr Hulbert, who had never seen Howler.

They showed him a photo and when he came round again he sat in the corner shivering. A very tiny voice in his brain tried to say,
surely even the very worst creature has some redeeming feature
, but the rest of his brain said,
if you even think that again, I will smash your head against the wall.

‘It would appear,' said Mordonna, ‘that we have no choice but to set her free.'

‘There must be something we can do,' said Nerlin and, looking at Spudly, added, ‘Could you take us to where they all are?'

The young goblin nodded.

Nerlin wrote a note saying they would set Howler free, but they needed forty-eight hours because her hippo undies were in the wash, plus another twenty-four hours after that because of the time it would take to reach the cave. He tied the note to the vulture's leg and sent it back, which wasn't actually going to work because the Grime Reaper
had shot the poor bird out of the tunnels so quickly everything was a blur.

‘Well, just go back to the mouth of the tunnel you came out of and wait,' Mordonna told the vulture. ‘I've no doubt the Grime Reaper has some way of knowing when you're there.'

‘Won't he be expecting the bird to take the little goblin back with him?' said Mr Hulbert.

So Nerlin added another sentence to the letter that said they were keeping Spudly as insurance.

‘Like he'd care what happens to him,' said Mordonna, ‘but it might stop his suspicions.'

They summoned the fastest horses in town and set off within the hour and reached Yggdrasil, where Spudly ran down into the goblins' cave to fetch Nedwin.

‘Wait a minute,' said Winchflat. ‘There's a warning light flashing on my Safety Meter. I need to check it out before we go any further.'

As they followed Winchflat into the tree, the light flashed faster and faster and there was no sign of Spudly returning. They stopped while Winchflat
twiddled knobs, read dials and pressed buttons.

‘Ah,' he said at last. ‘There's good news and there's bad news.'

‘What's the good news?' said Mordonna.

‘We're not in any serious danger.'

‘And the bad news?'

‘In the cave ahead there are fifty-eight cardigans and some of them have pictures of reindeer knitted into them,' said Winchflat. ‘I would advise everyone to put on their dark glasses.'

‘But …' Mr Hulbert began, but almost instantly the tiny voice inside his brain said
if you so much as hint you can't see what's wrong with cardigans, I will be forced to cut off your blood supply from the neck upwards
.

‘What?' said Nerlin.

‘Nothing.'

‘I think if we all come out of this unscathed, we might relax the cardigan laws a little bit,' said Nerlin.

‘WHAT?' Mordonna exclaimed.

‘Only a tiny bit. Obviously, knitted pictures of animals would still be totally illegal as would those
awful buttons woven out of leather, but I think maybe we could let people wear plain-coloured cardigans in the privacy of their own homes as long as there were no children under sixteen present.'

‘Eighteen,' said Mordonna.

‘OK, eighteen,' Nerlin agreed.

‘And only after dark with the lights off.'

‘Naturally.'

‘I still think it's a bit risky,' said Mordonna. ‘There's no way of knowing where that sort of thing could end up. People could start watching cricket and actually staying awake, or they could end up painting themselves beige.'

‘I'm sure nothing that extreme will happen,' said Nerlin.

When they got down to the cave it appeared to be deserted. Winchflat's Safety Meter indicated that there were living creatures nearby and that they were all hiding in saucepans. He whispered this to Mordonna, who said very loudly, ‘Oh, look at all those saucepans. Let's put them on a very hot fire and make some soup. Why, I'm so hungry I could eat a stewed goblin.'

All the lids flew off the saucepans and the goblins leapt out and fell on the floor, grovelling at Mordonna's and Nerlin's feet.

‘Please don't cook us,' Nedwin cried. ‘We didn't meant to make all those cardigans. We'll unpick them and knit them into hot-water bottle covers.'

‘Never mind about the cardigans,' said Nerlin.
‘We're actually going to make them sort of legal.'

‘Oh,' said Nedwin. ‘Really?'

‘With certain conditions,' said Mordonna.

‘So they won't be against the law any more then?' said another goblin.

‘Not as such, no.'

‘Oh,' said several goblins, obviously quite disappointed. ‘We only did them because weren't supposed to.'

‘Ah,' said Mordonna, ‘so you must be the Naughty Goblins. When I was a little girl my nanny used to say if I didn't go to sleep, the naughty goblins would come and get me. I didn't think you were real.'

‘Oh yes,' said Nedwin. ‘Though we don't actually go and kidnap sleepless children.'

‘No,' said Spudly. ‘Though we do kidnap vegetables, especially potatoes.'

‘Do you mean you hold potatoes for ransom?' said Mr Hulbert.

‘No, not for ransom,' Nedwin explained. ‘We do hold them, but then we sort of eats them.'

After everyone had eaten a delicious dinner of
kidnapped vegetable soup, it was time to go down the tunnels to the Grime Reaper cottage and rescue the real hostages. Spudly led the way, followed by Winchflat with his Safety Meter set to high, and then everyone else. They jumped through the waterfall, though all the goblins had to be reassured several times that the water would not make them shrink
³⁶
and then as they approached the cave, Winchflat's machine started to glow, not just the red lights but the whole machine, until it was so hot he had to drop it.

‘There is a forcefield around the cave,' he said. ‘I've never seen anything so powerful.'

‘Is it dangerous?' said Nedwin.

‘I don't know, but if anyone doesn't want to go any further, I think we'll understand,' said Winchflat. ‘But my wife is being held prisoner in there, so I am going on.'

‘Me too,' said Mr Hulbert, filling his pockets with pebbles.

‘I think we'll all be going on,' said Nedwin. And they did.

However, before they reached the cave, the Grime Reaper decided it was time to take action. Generating powerful forcefields was one thing, but coming face to face with the awesome power of Mordonna Flood was another. He could make machines glow and melt, but he couldn't touch a single hair on Mordonna's head and he knew it. He also suspected that if he came face to face with her, she could cast a spell that would make him stay in whatever shape he had shift ed to, and he did not want to spend the rest of his life as a cottage.

Normally in a situation like this, he would have simply shapeshift ed into something very fast like an eagle or a flying fish, or into something very small and undetectable like a germ, but with the four hostages trapped in the cottage, he couldn't do either of those without setting them free. He could, however, grow legs. So that was what he did. He just hoped he could reach the tunnels at the far end of the cave before Mordonna and all the others arrived.