Floods 10 (2 page)

No one was very interested. They had managed without any names until then and couldn't see much point in changing.

‘After all,' said an old witch from, umm, from where she lived, ‘I know where I am.'

‘But supposing you go somewhere you haven't been before and you get lost?' said Maldegard. ‘How would you get home again?'

‘I'd use my GPS,' said the old witch. ‘I may be old and bent and live on a diet of potato peeling and slugs, but I does have a GPS on my broomstick and a cup-holder. This is the twenty-first century, you know.'

‘You've got GPS?' said Edna. ‘That's amazing.'

‘No 'tisn't,' said the old witch. ‘Everyone's got them. Mine's called Byron.'

She went to the window and whistled. A pigeon flew down from the roof and landed on her arm.

‘See,' said the witch. ‘This is Byron, my Global Pigeon Scout. Don't humans have homing pigeons?'

‘Umm, yes, they do,' said Edna. ‘Well, some people do.'

‘So no matter where I go,' said the old witch, ‘as
long as I take Byron with me, I can always find my way home. I just has to follow him.'

‘But …' Maldegard began, but she knew there was nothing she could say to make the old woman change her mind.

‘I think we take it as read that the two of us have a totally free hand with the names,' said Edna.
‘Obviously you get first pick, because you're in charge.'

‘Well, you can choose too,' said Maldegard. ‘So, as I was saying, I think we should come up with a name for here. I mean, it's the only big town in the whole country. It's home to one of the few things that has got a name, Castle Twilight. It's the place where the King lives, where the Parliament's going to be if they ever decide they really want one, and it's the only place with normal flushing lavatories as you and I know them.'
⁶

‘How about a name that honours King Nerlin?' Edna Hulbert suggested. ‘Like Nerlintown or Nerlinsville?'

‘I like your thinking,' said Maldegard. ‘It would
certainly put us in the King's favour, but I think we need something grander.'

‘Merlintown?'

‘No – something that says, this is the place where the greatest wizards ever live.'

‘Floodstown?'

‘No. We need something more exciting.'

They spent the rest of the day coming up with name After name and couldn't find one that they even half-liked, never mind loved. They tried sticking their fingers in a book and choosing the first word they touched, but still they got nowhere.
⁷

‘I know what we could do,' said Edna. ‘I'll phone a friend.'

‘What?'

‘When we lived in Acacia Avenue, I had a friend who was really good at thinking up names for things – I bet she'd come up with a really good name.'

‘OK,' said Maldegard, ‘but you mustn't tell her what the name is for. I think it would be rather
embarrassing if it got out the capital of Transylvania Waters doesn't have a name and we can't think of one.'

‘But she might think it's for a puppy or some new soap powder.'

‘Well, we'll wait and see what she comes up with.'

Edna's friend suggested Digestive because she got it into her head that the name was for a biscuit.

‘If we can't even name the capital city, this could take the rest of our lives,' said Maldegard.

‘Yes,' Edna agreed. ‘I thought it was all going to be quite an adventure, but so far it's been really dreary.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I said, it's really dreary,' said Edna.

‘That's it!' Maldegard exclaimed.

‘What?'

‘The name. The capital city of Transylvania Waters will be called Dreary.'
⁸

‘Brilliant!' said Edna.

‘Brilliant!' said Mordonna and Nerlin.

‘Brilliant!' said everyone else.

So that was it. The capital of Transylvania Waters was named Dreary because it was the perfect name. This was not a bad thing because dreary means dull and damp and the city was both of those things and so much more.

Naming the bits of Dreary was a lot easier. After all, none of them were as important as the city itself. The two women set off with their sharp pencils and clipboards and walked round town, giving all the streets, road, lanes and alleyways names. There were no avenues to name because Transylvania Waters was not that sort of place.

They reached the highest point of the town and stood looking out over the dull grey mould-covered roofs. The whole place had a warm, comfortable smell like fresh compost. As the two women stood there, thinking how their lives had changed so much recently, a small wet dog came along and threw up on Maldegard's foot.

They named the place Regurgitate Hill
⁹
and went
back down to the castle to get further instructions.

‘After all,' said Maldegard, ‘do we go left or right? For all we know, one way may be considered bad luck. You can never tell with wizards.'

‘Indeed,' Edna agreed. ‘Everything's back to front here. Thirteen's a lucky number.'

‘We'll ask the King. He'll know,' said Maldegard. ‘Or rather, Mordonna will.'

‘Before you go off map-making,' Nerlin suggested, when they got back to the castle, ‘maybe you could make a map of our castle. People keep getting lost so it would be handy to have one.'

This was true. It wasn't that Castle Twilight was incredibly huge, more that it was weird. Corridors would suddenly end for no reason, having gone nowhere, but if you went back the next day there might be a door or a staircase – though maybe it wasn't the same corridor you'd been in the day before, even though it looked exactly like it. There were windows that looked out on views that simply weren't there if you went outside to visit them, and there were
windows that showed you what was behind you.

‘That's a great idea,' said Mordonna. ‘I sometimes get the feeling that this castle is alive and playing naughty games with us. I mean, I got up this morning, went along the corridor to the Royal Lavatory
¹⁰
and when I went back to the Royal Bedchamber to get dressed, all my shoes were pointing north.'

The weirdest place in the whole castle was a tiny stone building that no one had ever been inside.

The centremost courtyard in Castle Twilight was a perfect square. The other twenty or so courtyards were not. Some were rectangular. One was almost nearly, but not quite, round and even the square ones were not exactly square. All had the slight variations that you would expect in an ancient castle. All except this central courtyard, which was so perfect that anyone who thought about that sort of thing could not believe how perfect it was.

‘No one,' they would say, ‘could build such a perfect square, especially all those hundreds of years
ago before tape measures had even been invented.'

But it was perfect. Even the most advanced laser surveying equipment said so. Each of the four sides was totally, absolutely, perfectly identical in length and each of its four corners was exactly 90.0000000 degrees plus a lot more noughts.

This perfect courtyard was known as the Perfect Courtyard.

And in the centre of the Perfect Courtyard stood a tiny windowless building that was also a perfect square. It was known as That Tiny Building In The Middle Of The Perfect Courtyard.

And in one wall of this tiny building there was a bronze door. It was known as the Mysterious Door because it was a door and it was mysterious. The Mysterious Door had no handle. Nor did it have a keyhole. It was perfectly smooth and flat apart from ten small squares near the top. They looked like a row of buttons, except buttons had not been invented when the Mysterious Door had been created and they didn't move if you tried to press them. They just sat there adding to the mystery. Over the centuries hundreds of
hands had run their fingers over the squares until they were worn smooth and shiny like pearls. The squares' shiny surfaces were pitted with faint dents where people had tried to smash their way in with axes, hammers and guns. The guns had been a particularly bad idea because the bullets had ricocheted off the door, bounced around the perfectly balanced walls of the courtyard and ended up in the back of the head of the person who had fired them. People have short, rather stupid memories, which meant that on average someone shot themselves once every ten years or so.

No one had ever opened the door and a thousand rumours had grown around what lay inside the room. Like most rumours, all the rumours were evil and dangerous and involved extra-terrestrial beings with very big eyes and long skinny fingers who had come from their home world and left a Sacred Ark containing something extremely powerful. The famous Old Crones of Transylvania Waters had a dozen different versions of what it was, ranging from a Purple Anthrax Virus that would wipe out the world to a More Of A Mauve-Coloured Anthrax Virus that would instantly
give everyone an insatiable appetite for curried brussels sprouts and then wipe out the world.

The Perfect Courtyard and its perfect square building with its Mysterious Door drove Winchflat mad. Its existence defied all logic and its impenetrability gave him sleepless nights. He had built a dozen different machines to try to see inside and/or get inside the little building, but every one had drawn a blank.

He tried X-ray, XY-ray and XYZ-ray machines, but always got the same flat black monitor screen staring back at him. He had tried drilling holes in the door with his special Nothing-Is-Harder-Than-This-Hypopneumatic-Drilling-Thing, but it had melted and blown all the fuses in the whole town. He had to be shouted at very loudly by everyone to prevent him from piling five thousand sticks of dynamite against the door and demolishing the entire castle. And he knew in his heart that, if he had done so and Castle Twilight and half the town had been blown to dust, when the dust had settled and all the fires had gone out That Tiny Building In The Middle Of The Perfect Courtyard would still be standing there, unscathed and unopened.