Pure Dead Brilliant Read online

  Pandora's eyes filled with tears again.

  “What? What's the matter?” Titus's stomach growled impatiently as he waited for his sister to reply. “Come on. We'll have to go back in there in a minute.”

  “It's Mrs. McLachlan,” Pandora sniffed. “She practically tore my head off before dinner. I've never seen her so angry . . . she went absolutely ballistic, and her eyes— Oh, Titus, it was awful.”

  “What about her eyes? Why was she angry? What—oh no—she found out about us borrowing her clock?”

  Pandora nodded slowly as fresh tears tracked down her cheeks.

  “Oh heck,” Titus groaned. “That means I'm in deep poo as well. Oh lord, I can hardly wait—”

  “No,” Pandora whispered. “I took the blame. I told her it was just me ‘borrowing' it. I didn't mention you . . . or the trip to 2022 or . . . any of that. I decided I'd better leave you out of it, since you'd been so freaked out by what we saw in the future, and—oh, those terrifying e-mails, and—well, I figured you'd had enough.”

  Titus gazed at his sister in amazement, stunned at her magnanimity.

  “Think of it as an early birthday present,” Pandora sniffed. “After all, there's no point in my buying you anything if you're about to inherit all that money, is there?”

  Titus's jaw dropped. For the last hour his thoughts hadn't once strayed in the direction of his inheritance. Suddenly the whole tangled mess of the tainted money and his unappetizing future as a bloated plutocrat came crashing back in. “Pandora . . . you're a—” he blurted incoherently. “I'm, um, not so—”

  “Come on, Titus. I can hardly hear the call to dinner over the racket coming from your stomach.” Fixing a brave smile on her face, Pandora turned the handle to open the kitchen door, propelling her brother ahead of her and adding in an undertone, “Mmmm-hmmm, don't those onions smell . . . burnt?”

  Written in the Stars

  Dinner had been a huge success, Luciano decided, peering myopically at the dusty bottles in the wine cellar. He carefully replaced the two Barolos in their rack and, kneeling down, removed two half-bottles of Tokai for after-dinner consumption. From the dungeons downstairs he could hear Nestor wailing his protests at the earliness of bedtime, and, over that, the sound of Ffup racing through a bedtime story in order to return upstairs and join the company.

  “And-then-the-handsome-dragon-opened-his-mouth-and-ate-the-ugly-princess-and-some-of-them-lived-happily-ever-after-the-end-good-night-kiss-kiss-lights-out-not-another-squeak-good-bye. . . .”

  Luciano found himself holding his breath in sympathy with Ffup, remembering how he himself had gone through similar bedtime rituals when the children were babies. Night after night, he'd turn out the light and get halfway down the corridor from the nursery before a wail would summon him back crib-side.

  “Wahhhhhhh,” came Nestor's response.

  Luciano exhaled noisily. Poor Ffup, he thought.

  “Oh, for heaven's sake, would you close your big yellow eyes and GO TO SLEEP?” the dragon hissed.

  “Wahhhhhhh.”

  Luciano could almost hear Ffup's resolve crumble, and moments later, he heard her sigh deeply and relent.

  “If I read you one more story, will you promise me you'll go to sleep then?”

  Smiling, Luciano stood up and carried the dessert wines into the kitchen. All family and guests had removed themselves to the comforts of the drawing room, leaving Marie Bain muttering balefully to herself as she washed the dishes. Choosing to ignore the fact that the cook appeared to be intent on smashing the china rather than cleaning it, Luciano piled a silver tray with tiny almond cantuccini biscuits, unwrapped a panforte and cut it into bite-sized morsels, and uncorked both bottles of Tokai.

  Behind him, Marie Bain hurled empty tureens into the sink, pausing only to sneeze productively into the dishwater. Ffup appeared with Nestor clinging to her hip.

  “Won't he settle down?” Luciano picked up the laden tray and smiled at the dragons.

  “Eughhhh. Babies. What a complete pain.” In contrast to her words, Ffup planted a kiss on Nestor's head and shifted his weight in her arms. “He's worked himself up into a complete froth: utter hysterics every time I try to sneak back upstairs. He refuses to let me out of his sight for some reason. . . .”

  “Come and join us in the drawing room.” Luciano opened the door onto the corridor. “Who knows, we might be able to bore him to sleep.”

  A resounding crash from the sink indicated that Marie Bain had abandoned her attempts to clean the clay casserole in which the pasta sauce had simmered. Wincing as Ffup picked her way through pot shards, Luciano held the door open to allow her to carry Nestor safely out, then closed the door firmly on Marie Bain's dishwashing tantrums.

  To Titus's frustration, an opportunity hadn't yet occurred for him to speak privately with Mrs. McLachlan about Fiamma, although he was beginning to suspect that the nanny was more aware of lurking dangers than he had given her credit for: the salt-spilling at dinner had looked, to Titus, to be an act of magical terrorism, and the rapid disappearance of the demon from the dinner table seemed to confirm this. Fiamma had reappeared later, and even now was perched on a footstool by the fireplace, determinedly avoiding some of her colleagues' entreaties to join them in a game of charades.

  She hooded her eyes and affected total ignorance of the fact that Nestor was trying to flame-grill her feet. Much to Ffup's embarrassment, her baby son now appeared to be unable to share a room with Fiamma d'Infer without trying to cremate her. Eventually the witch stood up, and on the pretext of having to make a few phone calls, headed upstairs to her room. To the relief of the assembled company, Nestor immediately fell fast asleep.

  Before Titus could seize the opportunity to draw Mrs. McLachlan into a quiet corner, the estate lawyer came over to sit beside him, perching awkwardly on the edge of the sofa as if poised for flight.

  Cramming a handful of cantuccini into his mouth, Titus attempted to look at least awake, if not very interested.

  “Your father and I have laid out the relevant documents ready for your signature.” The lawyer drummed his long fingers on his knees and raised his eyebrows pointedly. “So, if you'd just take a minute to work through them, then I can be on my way.”

  Across the room, Black Douglas muttered in Signora Strega-Borgia's ear, “What d'you call a lawyer who's been chained, gagged, and dropped in cement shoes into the sea?”

  “A good start,” she replied. “More coffee, anyone?”

  “Mmmfffle.” Titus hadn't quite realized how badly cantuccini need to be accompanied by liquid, preferably wine. His mouth felt as if it were crammed with dusty boulders, and crunch and swallow as he might, he couldn't manage to reduce the volume of masticated biscuit-rubble enough to allow him to speak. In despair, he heard his father excuse himself from the guests and invite the lawyer and Titus to join him.

  Swallowing jagged lumps of biscuit, Titus followed the adults upstairs to the library, where someone had thoughtfully lit a fire and turned on the lamps, but had neglected to close the windows. Drawn by the light, a significant proportion of the insect population of Argyll was flitting across the ceiling, occasionally dispatching its more challenged members to their deaths by toasting on lightbulbs. Giant shadows of moths and daddy longlegs danced across the spines of the Borgias' collection of thousands of books, and Titus inwardly gave thanks that Tarantella was no longer residing in his T-shirt. The prospect of having tarantula drool dribbling down his chest distracted him from the more immediate problem of how to avoid ingesting a lungful of gnats with each indrawn breath.

  “Should we adjourn to another room?” the lawyer asked, praying that the answer would be affirmative.

  “It's only a few gnats.” Being Italian, Luciano regarded the scourge of Argyll to be a watered-down version of the more macho mosquito; only a real lightweight would consider altering his plans to accommodate such a pathetic infestation. “Anyway, this shouldn't take too long, should it, Titus?”

&nb
sp; Titus was miles away, struck by a particularly vivid memory from earlier childhood, happily replaying it in his head and thus deaf to his father's question.

  . . . it had been a night just like this, same time of year, probably even the same number of insects. He'd been—oh, six, seven—yes, seven years old. His birthday, in fact, because he remembered helping Mum carry his birthday cake and a cooler full of bottles of lemonade and champagne. Pandora was on Dad's shoulders, giggling as he ran down the bramble-lined path to the lochside, bouncing her with each step, till her unself-conscious five-year-old's laughter rang out across the still water.

  There had been an old rowboat moored at the end of the jetty, its peeling sides knocking gently against the steps in time with the waves that lapped the tide line of the pebble beach. They'd all clambered into the boat—Dad had rowed out into the middle of the loch, and Mum had lit the candles on the cake. He had a vague memory of feeling sad when the candles had been blown out and he'd consumed far more of his fair share of cake, and thus was lying back on the floor of the boat, bloated and anticlimactic, watching the stars pass by slowly overhead and feeling faintly depressed that he had a whole 364 days to wait until his next birthday.

  Then had come the miracle.

  A cry from his mother made Titus sit up and look to where her pointing finger indicated a patch of what resembled stars reflected on the water of the loch. A closer inspection revealed this to be a cluster of millions of points of light: tiny, luminous pinpricks just below the surface of Lochnagargoyle.

  “What are they?” he asked, leaning over the edge of the boat, all the better to see.

  “It's a form of phosphorescence,” Luciano said. “I've never seen it like this before.”

  Something in his father's voice made Titus fall silent. He leant into Luciano's embrace and watched in awe as the entire loch came alive with flashes of light.

  “Mummeeee!” Pandora exclaimed, jumping up and down and causing the boat to quiver in the sparkling loch. “Look, Mummy, the stars have fallen in the water!”

  Titus plunged his hand into a dark patch of water to see if it felt different. It didn't—but to his delight, when he withdrew his hand from the chilly loch, it had been magically transformed. Each finger glittered and sparkled, and as the water ran down his wrist, it etched a blazing comet trail in its wake.

  “Oh WOW!” Pandora had just made the separate discovery that by slapping her hand on the surface of the water, she could, in effect, hurl stars across the loch into the distant darkness. Fingers trailed in the water left a slowly fading line of stars in their wake. . . . Titus wrote his name in the loch and watched as the last starry “s” slowly faded to black.

  “It's gone,” he sighed. “Why does it disappear like that?” He wrote his name again, as if by repetition it would remain engraved indelibly on the loch.

  “Nothing lasts forever.” Signora Strega-Borgia smiled. “Titus, even if you wrote your name on stone, it would still vanish eventually.” Seeing her son's face fall at the discovery of his human frailty in the face of Time, the Ultimate Eraser, she sought to comfort him. “But think of this, Titus. Lochnagargoyle will remember your name: on some atomic level it was there, it is there, invisibly written on the water.”

  “It's like sand,” Titus said, remembering an afternoon spent drawing dinosaurs at the beach. “All those drawings we did in the wet sand, and then the tide came in and took them away out to sea. . . .”

  “Exactly.” Luciano fitted the oars in the oarlocks and began to head back to the jetty, each dip of the blade causing a brief phosphorescent flare. Behind him, the silhouette of StregaSchloss grew out of the darkness, its lit windows golden against the night.

  A white wraith flew across the meadow, its silence absolute; its identity unguessable until, with an inquiring hoot, it landed on an oak and waited there till an answering toowit released it to soar once again above the tree line. StregaSchloss beckoned and now, to Titus's delight, he saw a tiny figure outlined in each of its windows in turn as Latch pulled the curtains shut against the night, moving from room to room as if tucking the house in for the evening. For Titus, the sight of home, in all its solidity and permanence, was hugely comforting.

  Unseen by the family, over a turret on the far western corner, a star blazed across the sky, winking out as it appeared to fall into the black mass of trees skirting the foot of Mhoire Ochone. The bottom of the little boat scraped along a submerged rock as Luciano shipped the oars, then reached out for the mooring rope to pull them gently alongside the jetty.

  “But Dad,” Titus persisted, sensing bedtime drawing near and wishing to delay this by whatever means possible, “where did my name go? Where did the dinosaurs on the beach go when the water took them away?”

  Suddenly longing to put the children to bed and curl up by the fireside with his wife, Luciano sighed. “They . . . ah . . . they went . . . they became part of a bigger pattern. . . . Oh lord, help me out here, Baci.”

  Signora Strega-Borgia closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to frame an explanation that Titus could understand. “Titus . . . ,” she said at last, “we're all part of everything—we in our boat, the loch, the meadow, the stars—everything we can see and everything we can't. It's all kind of joined up like the biggest puzzle you could imagine. Just because we can't see something doesn't mean it's gone. . . . It's still there, but it has changed into something different. Sweetheart, it's awfully hard to explain, and I'm not sure that I even understand it properly myself, but think of it like this: I said ‘Nothing lasts forever,' but that's not the whole story. What I should have said was, ‘Nothing lasts forever unchanged.' Things change, Titus—they move on from one state to another.”

  “Like Mortadella,” Pandora supplied helpfully.

  “Um, yes . . . just like Mortadella,” her mother agreed, privately unsure if recalling Pandora's dead rat was such a good idea.

  “She swole up and died,” Pandora said matter-of-factly. “Then she went moldy, so we buried her in the garden and she turned into flowers.”

  “Bravo!” exclaimed Signor Strega-Borgia, standing up very carefully to avoid capsizing the boat, and grabbing hold of the ladder on the jetty. “I thought we'd all forgotten about her—”

  “I hadn't,” Pandora said.

  “Of course you hadn't, darling, but do you remember how, a year afterward, a little patch of forget-me-nots sprang up in the exact spot we'd buried her?”

  “Rats don't change into flowers,” Titus said with seven-year-old certainty.

  “Yes they do, Titus,” Luciano insisted. “Think—a tree starts with a seed from another tree, blown by the wind, dropped by a bird—”

  “In its poo.”

  “Thank you, Pandora. Yes, sometimes seeds are dropped by a bird ‘in its poo,' as you so quaintly put it. Then the seed grows into a sapling, then a tree, then it makes its own seeds for growing into other trees, and in time it grows old, withers, blows down in a storm—”

  “Or we cut it down. For firewood,” Titus insisted, ever a stickler for detail.

  “And yes—we burn it on our fires, but that isn't the end of the tree. It doesn't vanish—it turns first into flames and heat, then ash for the garden, and part of it turns into smoke and flies up out of the chimney. . . .”

  “But it's gone,” Titus wailed. “It's not a tree anymore.”

  “No,” Luciano conceded. “It has changed into smoke and ash, and in time, the clouds and the wind will carry it away and it will rain down on other trees in other places, and those other trees will drink it up through their roots—and in this way it will become a tree again.”

  “Oh! That's just so perfect. Well done, Luciano.” Baci sprang to her feet and flung her arms round her husband's neck—and before they could blink, the boat overturned, plunging them all into Lochnagargoyle. . . .

  “Titus—hello? Hello?”

  He blinked, recalled to the present by his father's voice. To Titus's relief he wasn't struggling in the chilly lo
ch, but slouched across a chesterfield in the library. Luciano stood before him, backlit by the logs burning in the fireplace, scratching irritatedly at a gnat bite behind one ear.

  “Sorry, Dad. Phwoof, I was miles away,” he mumbled, aware from his father's expression that something more was expected from him. “Um—what? Why're you staring at me like that?”

  “You look different, somehow.” Luciano tilted his head to one side and narrowed his eyes, peering at his son doubtfully. “I hesitate to say this because you'll probably regard it as an insult, but you look . . . oh . . . young and happy. Happier. Much, much happier than you were earlier this evening.”

  Titus smiled, somewhat baffled by his father's comments. Of course he looked young, he reasoned—compared to the two wrinklies in his present company, he was almost a newborn. And happy? Oh yes, he confirmed, feeling something vast and full of light streak across his thoughts. Yes, I'm so happy I could burst, actually. In a week's time I'm going to be pure dead grown-up. Thirteen! A teenager at long last. And . . . at long last, I know exactly what I want for my birthday . . . and, more to the point, exactly what I don't.

  “Dad,” Titus said, turning his back on the estate lawyer, “can I have a wee word—just you and me, for a moment?”

  Spilt Blood

  In a fit of rash generosity that she later regretted, Signora Strega-Borgia had given Fiamma a bedroom on the second floor, the walls of which were covered in panels of raw Chinese silk dating back to the P'Ing Imperial Dynasty. Sitting on the bed, her charred high heels digging holes in the coordinated silk quilt, Fiamma lit a tiny black cigar and sank back against the pillows with her cell phone tucked under her chin.

  “I need you to look something up for me,” she said, tapping ash onto the floor. “It's not available on the Internet, otherwise I'd have done it myself—so don't give me grief about your not being my personal search engine. You have to get up off your scaly haunches and go find the relevant file.”