Pure Dead Magic Page 13

  The family waited. Impatiently, Signor Strega-Borgia demanded, “Darling, are you sure you’re going to get it right this time? What if you turn us all into cockroaches or worse?”

  Signora Strega-Borgia threw her wand to the floor and burst into tears.

  The library door opened to reveal Mrs. McLachlan bearing a laden tray. “Now, dear,” she said, ignoring the loud sobs coming from her employer, “what we all need is a good strong cup of tea and maybe a wee fruit scone, or perhaps some of my seed cake, or fudge cake, or lemon drench cake, or plum cake, or banana loaf, or maybe,” she paused, ascertained that the Signora was still weeping, “… or maybe you’re not hungry?”

  She placed the tea tray firmly on top of the open book of spells and picked up the discarded wand. “Such a nuisance, these things,” she declared. “Simply not up to the job.” Signora Strega-Borgia looked up, her tear-stained face showing a faint glimmer of hope. “Now, dear,” continued Mrs. McLachlan, cutting the fudge cake into several generous wedges, “I’ve washed and ironed your best wand, and it’s waiting for you on the kitchen table. Why don’t you pop downstairs and get it, and meanwhile I’ll pour you a cup of tea?”

  Obediently, Signora Strega-Borgia headed downstairs to the kitchen. As soon as the sound of her footsteps faded away, Mrs. McLachlan pulled a small case from her pocket and fixed the family with a basilisk-like glare. “Not one word,” she commanded, holding up her hand for silence. “Not one word now, and not a squeak when the Signora returns, or there’ll be no cake. One day the Signora might become a very fine witch, but she’ll never do it unless she thinks she can.” Flipping open her case, Mrs. McLachlan began to type.

  Mrs. McLachlan met Signora Strega-Borgia clutching her laundered wand in the corridor outside the library. “Not that I know the first thing about magic, dear, but … might I make a wee suggestion?” Signora Strega-Borgia bit her bottom lip and nodded. “I’ve turned out the lights in the library to aid your concentration. There’s just enough light coming from the fireplace to allow you to see where to point your nice clean wand. Maybe you were just distracted last time by the sight of your loved ones in such a pickle? So … my advice, for what it’s worth, is do not turn the lights back on until you’re finished. That way, you won’t be able to see their wee faces, and you’ll be able to concentrate on doing your magic.” Patting Signora Strega-Borgia on the arm, Mrs. McLachlan opened the library door and led her employer inside.

  In the flickering firelight, Signora Strega-Borgia could just about make out the shapes of her family huddled by the fireplace. A thin and hairy leg waved encouragingly in her direction, followed by a hissed, “Tarantella … PAN, I mean, don’t distract her!”

  A stifled sob from Damp firmed up Signora Strega-Borgia’s resolve. I won’t fail, she decided, I simply can’t. My family needs me. I CAN do this. I think I am a good enough witch. She amended the last bit, I AM a good enough witch. I am. I am. Slowly, holding her breath, fingers tightly crossed, she began to spin. Behind her, holding Pandora’s camera, Mrs. McLachlan waited.

  Just as Signora Strega-Borgia stopped in mid-spin and pointed her trembling wand at her family, Mrs. McLachlan pressed the shutter release on the camera. It flashed; Signora Strega-Borgia gasped and rushed to turn on the lights.

  “Oh, well done, dear,” said Mrs. McLachlan, prompting the family with a glare.

  “Um … er … well DONE, Mum,” said Titus, catching on.

  “What a star,” added Tarantella, clapping all eight legs.

  “How ever did you do that?” said Signor Strega-Borgia and Pandora in perfect stereo.

  “Oh …,” said Signora Strega-Borgia, casually stirring her teacup with her wand, “it was easy.”

  At least, noted Mrs. McLachlan, carrying Damp upstairs to bed, she had the grace to blush.…

  The Taste of Summer

  “Oh, Marie, you shouldn’t have!” cried Mrs. McLachlan. “A cake! For my birthday! How kind.” She hugged the blushing cook and gazed at the cake in disbelief.

  “What an unusual color,” murmured Signora Strega-Borgia. “I’ve always thought gray so stylish.… come on, Ffup, do the candles, pet.”

  The dragon obligingly leaned forward and squirted flames from each nostril. Immediately the entire cake was alight.

  “Fifty candles,” whispered Titus. “Eughh. I don’t ever want to be that old.”

  “That can be arranged,” Pandora replied.

  Mrs. McLachlan took a huge breath.

  “Make a wish, make a wish,” Pandora pleaded.

  Mrs. McLachlan winked, and exhaled.

  “Bravo!” cheered Signor Strega-Borgia, lifting his glass to her. “Now your wish will come true.”

  “But you can’t tell us what it was,” Pandora said hopefully.

  “But you can cut the cake,” said Signora Strega-Borgia.

  Marie Bain handed Mrs. McLachlan a knife and scuttled back to the kitchen for plates.

  It had been a perfect day, thought Titus. If it had been my birthday wish, he decided, I would have wished that every day could be just like this one. Following a morning of unbroken sunshine, they had eaten lunch in the garden and now, replete and sleepy with happiness, the family and assorted pets lounged on the lawn on blankets and deck chairs, watching the sun slide into the sea loch. Late afternoon sunshine painted StregaSchloss gold, gilded them all in its gentle light, and drove the scent of honeysuckle out into the still air.

  If it had been my birthday wish, thought Pandora as she watched Mrs. McLachlan struggle to cut through the gray icing, I’d have wished for a different cake.…

  A shadow fell across the tablecloth. “Nonna!” Signora Strega-Borgia struggled to her feet. “What a pleasant surprise!”

  “And you thought fifty was old …,” Pandora whispered to her brother.

  A very wrinkly old lady was dripping over the remains of lunch. “Someone defrosted me …,” she mumbled, then caught sight of the cake. “How kind … a cake … for me? Is it my birthday? Again?”

  “Welcome back, Nonna.” Signora Strega-Borgia led the old woman to a deck chair and gently folded her into it. “Some tea? Champagne? Strawberries?”

  “Have they found it yet?” the old woman asked. Her voice sounded painfully dry, like the rustle of papery leaves, words made of dust. “The cure, you know,” she added. “You do remember, don’t you?” Her watery eyes fixed pleadingly on Signora Strega-Borgia.

  “No, Nonna,” she said. “Not yet.”

  Strega-Nonna shrank into her deck chair. In the sunshine, her skin was almost transparent. At her feet, Sab slumped with a small grunt. The old lady smiled, causing her face to crease up like a walnut. Creaking slightly, she bent forward to pat the griffin’s leathery head. “Dear faithful beast,” she murmured, “you’re wearing your six hundred years better than I am.…” The griffin looked up at her in adoration. “I miss our conversations,” she mused, “our long walks.… That freezer is pretty lonely, I can tell you. Still … one day.…”

  Two large tears squeezed out from under the griffin’s eyelids.

  Strega-Nonna levered herself to her feet. Painfully she bent down and took a strawberry from the fruit bowl. Titus watched, fascinated, as she popped it into her gummy mouth, mumbled it around for a moment, and swallowed. “Summer …,” she said, hobbling back to the house. “The taste of all those summers.…” She vanished into the shadowy doorway of StregaSchloss. Sab gave a small whimper.

  “What did she mean, ‘a cure’?” said Pandora.

  “For old age, sweetheart,” sniffed Signora Strega-Borgia, dabbing at her eyes with her napkin. “She’s waiting till they find a cure for old age, then she’ll stop living in the freezer.”

  “But can’t you cure her?” said Titus. “You know, with a spell or something? Magic her back to being young?”

  Signora Strega-Borgia sighed. “There are some things, Titus, that are way beyond my limited magical powers. A cure for old age is one of them.”

  The group on the
lawn was silent as they considered this. A tortoiseshell butterfly alighted on the cake, sampled some of the gray icing, and keeled over with a dying beat of its wings.

  “Poor Nonna,” said Pandora. “It must be awful just lying there with only ice cream and fish sticks for company.”

  “It’s her choice,” said Signor Strega-Borgia. “But personally, I think she’s making a big mistake.…”

  “It’s a family failing.” Signora Strega-Borgia smiled at Titus. “Don’t worry, she really is quite happy in her own way. Every time we have a power cut, she reappears, says hello, asks if there have been any advances in science, and then goes back to sleep. She’s been doing it for centuries.”

  “What did she do before freezers were invented?” asked Titus.

  “She lived near the North Pole,” said his mother, “in an iceberg. Under the aurora with whales and polar bears for company, not to mention millions of cod.”

  “I have the plates, Meesuss McCacclong,” called Marie Bain, emerging from the shadows around the house. She squinted in the sunlight, twisting her hands in her apron.

  “Oh Lord,” said Mrs. McLachlan, reminded of the cake. She renewed her efforts with the knife, but the icing remained immune to her assaults.

  “What is this stuff?” she demanded as the knife tip snapped off and pinged into a leftover bowl of potato salad. “Concrete?”

  “Yes,” said the cook, blissfully unaware of the effect this admission had on the assembled company. “Ees Readymix Concrete, eet say zo on ze packet.”

  “Marie dear,” said Mrs. McLachlan, “could you be an angel and bring me another knife? This one seems to be broken.”

  As the cook disappeared kitchenward once more, Mrs. McLachlan removed a small case from her pocket.

  Latch sighed—There she goes again, he thought, vanity, vanity.…

  There was a bright flash accompanied by the smell of burning sugar.

  “Heavens!” Signora Strega-Borgia said admiringly, displaying an abysmal ignorance of all things culinary. “How did you do that? Is it like a blowtorch? A sort of portable microwave thingy? What a clever thing.”

  Latch stared at Mrs. McLachlan. He put two and two together and arrived at five and three quarters.

  “This time,” she said to him under her breath, “I didn’t miss my target.”

  She raised her voice to its normal volume and added, “Marie—the knife, how very kind, dear. Now … cake, everyone?”

  Swimming with the Crocodile

  The first stars were appearing in the sky as the family finished Mrs. McLachlan’s birthday lunch. The cake had been devoured down to the last smear of icing, and Knot lay under a chestnut tree, slowly chewing his way through his forty-third pink candle.

  Latch and Mrs. McLachlan shook the tablecloth free of crumbs, the antique linen weave catching the last of the evening light. For an instant, they were joined by this luminous cloth as they folded and refolded it into a neat parcel.

  Signor and Signora Strega-Borgia ambled down to the lochside to watch the sun leach out into the sea. Titus noted with some satisfaction that they had their arms wrapped tightly around each other.

  “I think they’re going to be all right, Titus,” said Pandora. “We can stop worrying about them.”

  “Eugh, they’re kissing,” groaned Titus his delighted expression betraying how happy he was to see his parents engaging in such revolting behavior.

  Pandora sighed and rolled over onto her stomach. “I’ve eaten too much,” she remarked happily.

  “Pig,” said Titus.

  Pandora ignored him, reaching out to scoop leftover chicken legs and salami sandwiches into a bowl.

  Titus watched her with horror. “You’re not …,” he said.

  “Eat this lot?” She balanced the bowl on top of a tureen full of potato salad. “Don’t be ridiculous, I’m going to feed Tock. Keep me company?”

  “I’ll come in a minute.” Titus yawned and stretched crab-wise in the dewy grass. He watched his sister disappear round the side of StregaSchloss, heading for the moat. After a whole day of sun and food he felt too full to move just yet. Overhead, the familiar constellations winked into being, pinpricked against a lilac sky. Bats flew out from the eaves of the house, skillfully avoiding the treetops in their nocturnal quest for food.

  The water in the moat was still, mirroring the moon rising over the distant hills. Pandora placed her offerings on the warm stone that rimmed Tock’s home, and sat down to wait. On the far bank, a frantic thrashing amongst the water lilies indicated that she wouldn’t have to linger long.

  With a series of rusty creaks and honks, Tock’s snout broke water three feet away from Pandora. Ancient yellow eyes met her green ones. Pandora shivered. The sight of all those teeth, askew like tombstones in a disused graveyard, reminded her of her recent narrow escape. Tock’s nostrils flared as he caught wind of his dinner. He sped toward it, throwing up a wave in his wake. Pandora leapt to her feet and jumped backward, just as the crocodile hurled itself out of the water.

  Much to Pandora’s relief, she was not the reason for Tock’s haste. The crocodile ignored her completely, burying his nose in the pile of salami sandwiches. Greedily he opened his jaws wide and then appeared to undergo a change of heart. After devouring two of Pronto’s henchmen plus their knife and machine gun, the crocodile had taken a vow never to touch flesh again, especially not of the weapon-bearing kind.

  “Blark,” he honked, pointing to the salami. “Glurk ploot phitui.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Pandora said, not understanding one word.

  “Glop. Splug … drekk,” explained Tock, de-salami-ing the sandwiches and tossing the discarded pink circles into the undergrowth.

  “You don’t like salami?” Pandora inquired.

  “Drekk yrrg. Meat-blah,” Tock said, investigating the contents of the tureen.

  “You’re a recent convert to vegetarianism?” Pandora said, astonished. In her mind, a wild plan began to take shape.

  “Gaw titin wun,” Tock said, wolfing potato salad. On reflection, he picked up the tureen and ate it as well. Displaying alarming amounts of teeth in a grin, he waddled back into the moat and glided effortlessly away into the darkness just as Titus came looking for his sister.

  To Titus’s horror, he arrived in time to see Pandora strip down to her underwear and dip a foot in the water of the moat. She’s not, he thought, breaking into a run.

  Without turning her head to show that she’d spotted him, Pandora said, “So. I’m a wuss, am I? A scaredy sissy? A cowardy cuss?”

  “Pan. Don’t do it. The bet’s off.”

  “Maybe so,” she said, straightening her arms out in front of her, “but you’ll always think that I ratted on the deal.”

  “No. Well … maybe,” admitted Titus.

  Pandora rose on her toes and brought her arms together over her head. On the far side of the moat, in an area of deepest shade, something stirred. Something that hadn’t eaten a nanny for weeks.

  “Please, Pandora—DON’T DO THIS,” Titus begged, reaching the moatside at exactly the same time as his sister dived into the water. Large waves splashed over the stone surround, soaking Titus’s feet. From the area of deepest darkness, a wave of displaced water arrowed toward Pandora’s point of entry. “OH NO.…” Titus was terrified.

  This was worse than sending your baby sibling down the Internet, far worse than finding your mother drunk, worse even than being held at gunpoint.… He simply couldn’t imagine life without Pandora. As he flung himself into the moat, Titus remembered that for him, swimming lessons had been a complete washout. WHAT AM I DOING? He panicked, water closing over his head. I CAN’T EVEN SWIM AND THERE’S A RAVENING REPTILE IN HERE SOMEWHERE.…

  “HELP!” he screamed, surfacing. “HELP! HELP! I’M DROWNING!”

  “Don’t be such a wuss,” said a familiar voice.

  I’m dead, thought Titus, I’m hearing things. An unstoppable force propelled him at full speed across the moat.
Titus opened his eyes. He was pinioned across Tock’s snout. “NO!” he shrieked. “HELP! I’M BEING EATEN BY A CROCODILE! SAVE ME!”

  In exasperation the crocodile’s slitty eyes rolled backward in its head. With an effortless jerk of his neck muscles, Tock tossed Titus onto his scaly back and set off across the moat again.

  Suddenly remembering why he’d jumped into the moat in the first place, Titus wrapped his arms around Tock’s neck and tried to throttle his sister’s assassin.

  “Aaah,” said Tock. No one had ever hugged him before. To show his appreciation, he playfully nibbled Titus’s arms.

  “AAUGHH. HE’S GOT ME! I’M DYING!”

  “Titus, for heaven’s sake, do shut up.”

  “Pandora? You’re alive?”

  “Yes. And so are you,” Pandora said, treading water in front of him. “Tock, let go of him.”

  The crocodile released his grip on Titus’s arms.

  To Titus’s embarrassment, they weren’t even scratched.

  “Titus, what are you doing in the moat?”

  “Rescuing you from this beast.”

  “Oh, Titus … what a brave thing to do.”

  “No,” Titus said, edging warily along Tock’s back, away from the rows of teeth, “it wasn’t brave, it was stu—”

  His words were lost in an explosion of bubbles as Tock dived underwater. Titus found himself gripped in a strong pair of arms and towed back to the surface again.

  “Pandora,” he spluttered, half-drowned. “What are you doing?”

  “Rescuing you, brother mine.” She expertly struck out for dry land, cupping Titus’s chin in her hand. “Rescuing you from yourself.…”

  * * *

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Latch moaned. “Instead of letting me make an idiot of myself.…”

  Mrs. McLachlan gazed up at the night sky where the wheeling shapes of Sab and Ffup were silhouetted against the stars. “You didn’t make an idiot of yourself, dear. On the contrary, you were exceedingly brave.”