Survivor (8 page)

Sunday arrived with wind, clouds and rain, but Winchflat went down to his cellar, twiddled a few knobs on his ‘Perpetual Sunshine Machine’ and all the wind shrivelled up and vanished while the clouds went off to annoy Belgium. He adjusted the temperature gauge and the air grew comfortably warm. Merlinmary breathed flames onto some fallen branches and made charcoal for the barbecue.

‘Now, I want everyone to be on their best behaviour,’ said Mordonna. ‘The Hulberts are shy sort of people so I don’t want to see any body parts being dragged round the garden. If you do play
catch or fetch with the children, Satanella, do it with a red rubber ball, not a knotted ball of pig’s intestines.’

Along the road, Mrs Hulbert was giving her family similar instructions. ‘Now, I want everyone to be on their best behaviour,’ she said. ‘The Floods are not like other people, but Mrs Flood and Betty have been very nice so I’m sure the rest of the family will be too. And remember, they are the only family that has come and said hello to us since we moved in.’

This bird was flying by when it saw the Hulberts and fell asleep from boredom.

‘Don’t worry, they’re all nice, Mum,’ said Ffiona. ‘They might look a bit weird – well, actually, some of them look very weird indeed – but they are really nice.’

This was said for the benefit of Mr Hulbert, who was very, very, very, very normal and tended to get quite nervous when he came into contact with anything that was the slightest bit out of the ordinary. A car painted in fluorescent pink with blue spots on the doors passed him once and it upset him for a week. Mrs Hulbert ironed all the folds
out of the newspaper every morning so he wouldn’t worry about missing any words in the creases.

Ffiona’s little brother, Claude, was young enough to think everything was exciting. He had only learned to walk a few months earlier – though he was still much better at falling over than standing up. He was also just starting to speak words that made sense, and now had a vocabulary that included the words goo, poo, and Ffuffuff, which is what he called Ffiona, and ughherr, which was what he called everyone else. He was still much too young to have caught his parents’ anxiety.

‘I don’t suppose Betty’s got a younger brother or sister who could play with Claude, has she?’ said Mrs Hulbert as they walked down the road.

‘No, Betty’s the youngest,’ said Ffiona.

‘Oh well.’

But Mrs Hulbert needn’t have worried. As the Floods front gate opened itself to let the Hulberts in, a lot of things happened at once. Firstly, Mordonna released a mega squirt of relaxing-with-witches
powder into the air, making sure a good shot of it went up Mr Hulbert’s nose.

Secondly, Claude saw Satanella and went racing towards her, with Mrs Hulbert trying to rescue him. As he reached Satanella, the toddler tripped on the path and fell over, but instead of crashing down on the concrete and hurting himself, he landed on a nice soft dog as Satanella threw herself underneath him.

‘Goo, poo, ffuffuff, ughherr,’ he chuckled as he buried his face in Satanella’s fur.

‘Goo, poo, ffuffuff, Satanella,’ said Satanella, licking Claude’s face.

‘Wow, I’ve never licked a baby human before,’ she added. ‘Of course, I’ve always wanted to. Who hasn’t? And now I have, they taste even nicer than I imagined, a sort of mixture of stewed prunes and earth.’

‘That’s what he was eating before we came here,’ said Ffiona.

‘D-d … d-d … did that dog, um, err, speak?’ said Mrs Hulbert.

Mr Hulbert just stood open-mouthed. There was nothing in his brain that said what you’re supposed to do when you hear a dog talk, so all he could do was stare.

‘Let me explain,’ said Mordonna, putting her arm round Mrs Hulbert’s shoulder and taking her into the house.

‘Let me explain,’ said Nerlin, putting his arm round Mr Hulbert’s shoulder and walking him down the back garden to his shed.

‘I think that went well,’ said Betty.

‘Compared to what?’ said Ffiona and the two girls burst out laughing.

When they heard Ffiona laugh, Morbid and Silent were so overcome with love and blushes that they had to run and hide in their room.

‘I wonder if she will ever marry me,’ Morbid said to himself as they looked down into the garden where the two girls were playing with Claude and Satanella.

How can she?
Silent said inside his twin’s head.
She’s going to marry me.

Now in the human world this sort of situation would lead to terrible fights and possibly even murder, but wizards are a lot more intelligent than humans and can usually find much more civilised solutions to their problems, solutions that generally avoid killing each other, though sometimes someone might get turned into a toad.

‘When we are old enough to get married,’ said Morbid, ‘we’ll get Winchflat to photocopy Ffiona so we can both marry her.’

Just so long as we make sure that neither of us ever finds out which is the original and which the copy
, Silent telepathed.
Agreed?

‘Agreed,’ said Morbid.

The twins squeezed the insides out of a Giant Transylvanian Slime Worm and wiped it on each other’s faces, which is the wizard version of spitting on your palm and shaking hands.

‘Maybe we could get him to make three photocopies,’ said Morbid. ‘Then we could have a spare Ffiona each.’

I don’t think he’d do that
, said Silent.

The twins realised that if they did marry two Ffionas, it would be the end of being wizards, not for them, but for any children that they might have. Because it is a well-known fact that if a wizard or witch marries someone who is not a wizard or witch, none of their children will be able to do any magic at all. There was a rumour a few years ago
that a taxi driver who had a witch for a mother but an ordinary human for a father could do magic, but it was all a misunderstanding. The Magic Examiners came and told him to turn his taxi into something.

‘No problem, mate,’ he said.

He grabbed hold of the steering wheel and turned it into a side street.

Sitting at the table in the Floods kitchen with what appeared to be completely normal human cups of tea, Mordonna explained to Mrs Hulbert that Satanella wasn’t really a dog but her daughter, who had been changed into a dog by accident.
²²

‘So there’s nothing weird to get worried about,’ she said. ‘Satanella isn’t a talking dog at all, she’s a little girl.’

‘Oh, umm, right,’ said Mrs Hulbert.

‘Though when I was a girl, my grandmother had a whippet that could recite its nine times table up to nine times six,’ Mordonna added, ‘but that’s not really the same thing.’

‘No, yes, umm, I see,’ said Mrs Hulbert.

The inside of her head was very confused. On the one hand, Mordonna was the only person in Acacia Avenue who had been friendly since they had moved there. On the other hand, her new friend had a small talking dog that she said was her daughter. But if Mrs Hulbert’s parents had taught her one useful thing,
²³
it was that you should never judge a book by its cover. The Floods might look weird, but they were kind and friendly and since Ffiona had met Betty, she had been happier than ever before. So Mrs Hulbert decided that if Mordonna said the little dog was her daughter, she would believe her.

Through the window, Mrs Hulbert could see Claude tottering around the garden after Satanella, who was tossing a big red rubber ball up in the air. He was grinning and laughing and waving his little arms around in total happiness. And every time he tripped over his feet, which he did every ten steps or so, Satanella always managed to throw herself underneath him to cushion his fall. As Mrs Hulbert watched, Claude and Satanella landed on top of a flower-covered mound near the clothesline. The ground parted slightly and a skeleton arm came up out of the earth. It patted Claude gently on the head, ran its fingers through Satanella’s fur and vanished back into the ground.

Don’t panic
, said the cautious voice that lives inside the head of all slightly nervous people like Mrs Hulbert.

‘Don’t panic,’ said Mordonna. ‘That’s just my mother saying hello. Nothing to worry about, she adores little children.’

‘Right, OK, lovely.’

‘More tea?’ said Mordonna. ‘I wonder what
the boys are up to. It’s probably time we should be lighting the barbie.’

‘I don’t think Ffiona brought her Barbie with her,’ said Mrs Hulbert.

‘It’s not the doll, Mummy,’ said Ffiona as she and Betty came into the kitchen. ‘Mrs Flood means the barbecue.’

Meanwhile, Nerlin had taken Mr Hulbert to the shed at the bottom of the garden because he’d seen on TV that the shed was where blokes went to do blokey things. Nerlin hadn’t built this shed. It had belonged to the previous owners of number 11, the Dents,
²⁴
and it was full of all the usual things that human men have in sheds: a couple of very grubby worn-out armchairs complete with mouse nests in the stuffing, a rusty fridge, dozens of broken household items like old toasters and video machines, and lots and lots of tools. There was everything from screwdrivers and angle grinders right up to a huge electric welder.

Nerlin was hoping Mr Hulbert could explain what all these things were for. Unfortunately, Mr Hulbert was not a shed type of man either. He was more a stamp-collecting man.