Floods 10 (13 page)

The stairs ended in a small round room, not a
natural cave, but a place that had been deliberately carved out of the rock. The ceiling was so low the two women had to kneel and there was a small throne, too small even for a young child, a tiny table and four equally tiny chairs.

‘Dad, Dad, is this the lost palace of our ancestors?' said Spudly.

‘No, lad,' said his father. ‘Look at the throne and the chairs. Even a ten-year-old goblin would be too big to fit in them.'

‘It's all very strange,' said Edna. ‘Almost as if aliens from another world were here.'

‘Of course, we're assuming they were actually used by living creatures,' said Maldegard. ‘They could have been some sort of symbolic thing like an altar or an ancient doll's house.'

‘There's a letter,' said Spudly, picking up an envelope from under the throne.

‘A letter? What do you mean a letter?' said Maldegard.

‘It was under there, all covered in dust,' said Spudly.

‘You're sure it's not yours and you dropped it?' said Edna.

‘No.'

Maldegard opened the envelope and read aloud:

and as she said the words, part of the cave wall fell away. There they were, as they had guessed, at the top of
which was deep in snow.
Spudly's father took his son's hand and bade the two women farewell.

‘Too cold for goblins, is that,' he said. ‘We'll go back along the tunnels.'

‘I want to go with them, Dad,' said Spudly. ‘I want to go and see the big wide world.'

‘What on earth for?'

‘I don't know, really, but something tells me I should,' said the young goblin.

‘A voice inside your head, is it, Son?'

‘Yes, Dad, a voice calling me,' said Spudly.

‘We'll look after him,' said Maldegard. ‘And if he gets homesick or there's a problem, we know where to bring him.'

‘I dunno,' said Spudly's dad, ‘but then I was the same when I was his age. I travelled as far as the big funny-shaped tree by the rock that looks exactly like a banana and it did me no harm.'

The opening in the cave wall closed behind them. Maldegard tucked young Spudly into her shoulder bag and the two women set off down the mountain, which involved sitting down on
the nearest rock, discovering their mobiles both had signals, phoning home and being collected by helicopter twelve minutes later.
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‘Sorry about the helicopter,' said Winchflat, ‘but all the flying broomsticks have got woodworm in their handles so I had to make do with this.'
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‘Those bones,' said Winchflat when they were all back at Castle Twilight and young Spudly had been tucked up for the night in a shoebox with two kittens to keep him warm, ‘those bones. When they blew up, did bits of them go everywhere?'

‘Absolutely, and not just dust but sticky bits of bone-marrow too,' said Maldegard. ‘My hair's thick with the stuff.'

‘Brilliant!' said Winchflat. ‘Can I shave your head?'

‘Do you have to?'

‘Can you imagine how old and amazing the DNA from those bones must be?' said Winchflat.
‘We could probably re-create dozen of ancient creatures. Who knows what we could discover.'

So Winchflat put a big paper bag over Maldegard's head, raced down to his workshop and built a DNA And Bone-Marrow Reclaiming Head Shaver with a Build AWig Attachment,
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raced back upstairs again and stuck it on her head.

‘Brilliant,' said Maldegard when he'd finished. ‘I've always wanted green hair.'

‘I chose green,' said Winchflat, ‘because I have this exciting dream where you and I are on holiday at a really beautiful sewage works. We are swimming across the settling ponds and your hair turns into the most exotic shade of green. It's my favourite dream.'

‘Lovely,' said Maldegard, who tended to dream of more conventional things like puppies and cake.
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After a few days' rest Maldegard and Edna set off on their map-making and naming work once
more. This time, they turned right, leaving Dreary on the opposite side.

‘And this time,' said Maldegard, ‘I think we'll stay above ground.'

‘Good idea,' said Edna.

‘What, all of the time?' said Spudly, who had grown up in tunnels and loved them dearly.

‘Yes.'

Spudly looked very disappointed and began to feel a little homesick. Maybe the big wide world wasn't such a great idea After all. Edna saw the anxiety in the goblin boy's face and tried to reassure him.

‘I'll tell you what we can do if you start missing your dark damp tunnels,' she said. ‘We'll put a big wet towel over your head.'

‘Could you do it now?' said Spudly so they wouldn't see the tears welling up inside him.

‘Are you sure you don't want to go home?' said Maldegard. ‘We can get a taxi broomstick to whisk you back in no time at all.'

A very big bit of Spudly did want to go home to the comfort of his family, but a little voice inside
his head told him not to be such a baby.

A goblin's got to do what a goblin's got to do,
it said and told him of all the wonderful things that lay ahead, like new and exciting root vegetables called Salsify, which was actually the name of Spudly's baby sister, and Scorzonera, which was the name of his half-Italian auntie.

You could very well be the first goblin to taste either of them, said the voice. Just think of it, you will boldly chew where no goblin has chewed before.

‘Wow!' said Spudly, forgetting his worries in an instant and flinging the towel aside. ‘Show me the veggies!'

Maldegard and Edna hadn't the faintest idea what Spudly was talking about, but he wasn't worried or homesick any more and that was good enough for them.

‘We shall name this place
,' said Maldegard as they rounded the next bend.

And so they went on.

Winchflat had never been so excited in his life, though if anyone had asked him he would have said it was the third most excited he had ever been – the first being meeting his beloved Maldegard and the second being the birth of his almost lovely daughter Princess Transistor.
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But if he was completely honest with himself neither of those wonderful things had quite as much wonderfulness as having a plastic box full of ancient Jurassic DNA. All thoughts of the wretched Mysterious Door were put aside. This was about fifty thousand times more exciting.

He cleared his laboratory bench and prepared for work. The engine that could run for six months on a single mosquito's fart that he had been on the
verge of perfecting
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was put aside for another day, as was his very ambitious Total-Peace-On-Earth-Forever machine.
⁴⁶

This was the big one.

This was the one that would win him the Nobel Prize and guarantee his place in history.

Winchflat's super high-powered electron microscope told him that he had more than fifteen different lots of DNA so the first thing he needed to do was build a machine to sort them into different piles. This took him a whole Afternoon and used over seven hundred and twelve pieces of LEGO, but by suppertime, Winchflat had all the different kinds of DNA in their own jars, plus a sixteenth jar with the left over bits he hadn't been able to sort out. He'd go back to that one.
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Of course, he had no idea what creatures any of the DNA had come from. DNA was all the same size. It wasn't like there was fat DNA that would make a giant brontosaurus or tiny DNA that would make a wasp. Winchflat wondered if the creatures he was about to re-create would love him in the same way the monster his remote ancestor Dr Frankenstein built had. He wondered if the creatures he was about to recreate would turn on him in the same way the monster his remote ancestor Dr Frankenstein built had. The whole undertaking was exciting and scary in equal parts.

Winchflat went and put on his thickest pair of trousers, just in case.

And his Nuclear Fallout underpants.

There was no scientific way the Prince chose which jar to try first, so he shut his eyes, turned round three times, turned round five times in the opposite direction and pointed. Something was calling to him. It seemed to reach out and grab him. When he opened his eyes he found he had got his finger stuck in the plughole of his laboratory sink.

He shut his eyes and reached out again.

DNA jar number six.

The jar contained about a thimbleful of dirty grey powder.

Maybe I should wash it first,
he thought,
but he was too impatient. The DNA Cycle on his washing machine took seventeen hours and he was determined to recreate at least one long lost life-form before bed time.

The biggest problem was deciding what size tank he would need for the job. If the tank was too big and the creature was tiny, there was a chance it could drown before he could lift it out of the Idiotic Fluid.
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But if the tank was too small and the creature was huge then it would burst the tank before it was completely developed. Also, the biggest tank he had was only about three metres long, though of course he could always use the swimming pool at the newly opened Merlin Leisure Centre
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and if that wasn't big
think though that if the creature was growing into something bigger than would fit into a swimming pool, it might be a good idea to terminate it before it ended up terminating everyone else.
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This is a lot more complicated than I thought it was going to be,
he thought.

The only thing to do was to try it and see what happened. He would start it off in a jam jar, screw the lid on tight and keep an eye on things. Then if the creature began to develop into something terrifying, he could flush it down the toilet.
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If it looked promising he would then transfer it into a tank, deciding what size to use based on what the creature looked like.

This was a good plan especially because it was
the only plan – which, of course, also meant it was the worst plan.

Winchflat filled a cleanish
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jam jar with Idiotic Fluid and tipped the DNA into it. He then put the lid on and did it up tight and then panicked because that might mean the growing creature could suffocate. So he undid the lid and stood the jar in the middle of the laboratory bench.

After an hour nothing had happened.

After two hours even more nothing had happened.

After three hours something did happen. Winchflat fell asleep.

After three hours and one minute Winchflat fell off his stool and landed on his back on the floor. His left ear fell off, but that was nothing unusual.

Night fell.

Around two a.m. Winchflat woke up.

There was something standing on his chest.

It was too dark to see what the something was,
but it wasn't very heavy and it didn't seem to be getting any bigger.

‘Lights,' Winchflat commanded and the light came on.

There was a chicken standing on his chest. It was holding Winchflat's fallen-off ear in its beak and staring at him. At first he didn't connect the chicken with the DNA experiment. After all, it was just an ordinary-looking chicken. It was brown and exactly the same size as your average chicken.
Nothing special at all. Certainly not an exciting recreation of a long extinct life-form.

Until it spoke.

‘I assume,' said the chicken, ‘that this is your ear.'

‘Yes,' said Winchflat, wondering why he wasn't surprised that a chicken had just spoken to him. ‘Thank you.'