Pure Dead Frozen Read online

  Mercifully, the pantry door closed behind him, rendering his remaining comments inaudible. Baci and Luciano did a synchronized eye-roll.

  “Teenagers,” came a voice from the direction of the kitchen china cupboard. “Lordy, how they do go on and on,” it continued. “And I should know. I’ve just fed my daughters, and listen to them….”

  “Muuum. This fly’s off, you know. It’s, like, totally rancid. You know I hate flies. I told you I hate flies.”

  “Why is there never anything decent to eat in this web? I’m starving.”

  “When is it proper suppertime? This pathetic pile of sundried gnats is just a wee snack, right? What is for supper, anyway?”

  As if pursued by Furies, a huge tarantula sprang out of a willow-pattern teapot on the cupboard and dropped to the floor on a hastily spun length of spider silk.

  “Give me strength,” she moaned, limping across the flagstones toward Baci. “What on earth possessed me to bring these vile children into the world? When I think back to how easy my life used to be before they arrived…” Tarantella, the harassed spider mother, wearily began to ascend the leg of the kitchen table, gaining the tablecloth just as a posse of assorted vast mythical beasts and a crocodile crashed through the door from the kitchen garden, followed by a baby dragon, who in turn was followed by an unspeakable stench.

  “It’s freezing out there.” Tock shivered, his crocodile’s teeth rattling like dice in a cup. “Any chance of anything to eat? I’m famished.”

  “Join the queue,” muttered Tarantella, arranging herself comfortably on top of a pomegranate withering in the fruit bowl. “Take your place behind the teenage man-child and my daughters—”

  “Anyone seen Ffup?” interrupted Sab, his leathery griffin’s hide covered in goose bumps as he headed for the range and unfolded his huge wings to dry over the stovetop. Baci reached up to pat her pet griffin and gave an involuntary squeak. She took a deep breath and rubbed her stomach, her expression inwardly focused.

  In the fruit bowl, Tarantella paused in mid-groom to stare at Baci with many calculating eyes. The tarantula’s gaze swiveled to take in the kitchen clock, then dropped back to resume combing her furry abdomen.

  “Ffup?” Luciano frowned, his nostrils wrinkling as an unpleasant smell rolled across the kitchen. “I thought she was with you.”

  “Yeahhh, so did we,” mumbled Knot, the Strega-Borgias’ pet yeti, sidling across the kitchen to slump against the range next to Sab. In the warmth of the stove, his fur began to give off a faint odor of rotting vegetation.

  “The reason I ask,” Sab continued, now mouth-breathing to avoid inhaling the ripe perfume of Knot’s pelt, which was matted and clotted with the evidence that the yeti still hadn’t worked out how to transfer his dinner from bowl to mouth without mishap. “The reason I ask,” Sab repeated, upping the volume, “is because Ffup’s baby is in dire need of a diaper change.”

  Silence greeted this statement as everybody suddenly found several pressing matters urgently requiring their undivided attention.

  Sab drummed his talons on the lids of the burners and sighed. It was no coincidence that Ffup disappeared every time Nestor needed a clean diaper. The baby dragon had a knack for suddenly turning from a milk-scented infant into something that smelled infinitely less pleasant; witness Baci’s pained expression as the first waft of Nestor’s diaper floated within range of her nose. For a brief moment she even closed her eyes, apparently overwhelmed by the baby dragon’s offending reek. Tarantella frowned, staring hard at Baci, and once again checked the time. She smiled and nodded, as if confirming something that, for the moment, she had decided to keep to herself. Oblivious to Tarantella, Sab sighed deeply. Obviously diapers weren’t Baci’s thing. Hence the fact that as well as a butler, the Strega-Borgias employed two live-in nannies: one upstairs recuperating from a near-drowning incident, and the other…

  “Oh dear. Nestor? Was that you?”

  Nestor froze in place, caught licking a chair leg where an overlooked lump of Damp’s breakfast porridge had stuck several days before. The baby dragon’s tail drooped, his entire expression radiating regret.

  “Oh, Nestor, poppet. We had an agreement, no?”

  A young woman stood in the doorway to the kitchen garden, balancing on one leg while she removed a sparkly pink Wellington boot and placed it beside its identical twin. She shook out a mane of golden hair and beamed at the assembled family and beasts.

  “What a whiffy, huh?” she continued, striding toward the baby dragon and scooping him up in her arms as if he weighed no more than a bag of sugar. She peered into the offending diaper and groaned. “Come on, my darling. Let’s get this nasty thing off your bottom and give it a decent burial….”

  Nestor submitted to this indignity, hanging in the young woman’s arms like an understuffed draft stop while she gathered together a selection of dragonish toiletries and bore the baby beast off to the downstairs cloakroom.

  Immediately the kitchen began to smell better.

  “What was their agreement?” Luciano wondered out loud, drizzling the top of the pizza with olive oil.

  “What, Nestor and Minty?” Baci said, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. “Being a fully qualified nanny, Minty made a star chart to encourage Nestor with toilet training and other things. As I understand it, if he can get through a whole day with no dirty dia—” Baci broke off in mid-sentence and gasped.

  Tarantella glanced at the kitchen clock and pursed her mouthparts. “I’d say they’ve been coming every two minutes,” she said cheerily. “You might just make it in time, if he can be persuaded to drop his precious pizza and drive you to the hospital—”

  “Knot—for Pete’s sake,” Luciano roared. “Would you go and toast your bottom somewhere else? How am I supposed to get this into the oven with you in the way?”

  Unabashed, the yeti began to drool at the sight of what Luciano held in his hands. “Ooooh, yessss,” he slobbered. “Pitzer. Pits? Or is it patzi?” he hazarded. “My favorite. And with those wee hairy fishies as well. Yummeee.”

  “On the other hand,” Tarantella muttered, “we could all squeeze up at one end of the kitchen table to give you space to get on with having your baby while we have supper….”

  “LUCIANNNNNOOO!” Baci wailed.

  The pizza crashed to the floor as Luciano spun round to face his wife.

  “Baci?” he quavered. “Is it the baby? Now?”

  “Get…the…car,” Baci muttered through clenched teeth, levering herself to her feet with some difficulty.

  “KEYS!” shrieked Luciano. “Where the hell…?”

  “This is exciting,” said Tarantella, clambering to the top of a candlestick to get a better view. “I’ve never seen a live birth before—eggs are more my kind of thing.”

  “Darling,” Baci groaned, “those are the keys to the lawn mower….”

  “AUGHHHHHHHH!” roared Luciano, one foot embedded in the raw dough of his abandoned pizza, the other desperately seeking purchase on the floor, which was now slippery with olive oil and scattered anchovies. “What bloody idiot spilled food all over the floo—?”

  “Now, dears,” came a voice from the door to the hall, “why don’t you let Latch drive you both to the hospital? He’s bringing the car round to the front just now. Signora, dear, I’ve taken the liberty of packing your suitcase; there’s a clean nightie, your chamomile pillow, a bottle of lavender water, some mint tea bags, a wee pot of honey, and that beautiful book of flower paintings from beside your bed….”

  As one, all heads turned to gaze in astonishment at the frail figure of Flora McLachlan silhouetted in the kitchen doorway. She stood before them, her silvery hair unpinned and tied with a black velvet ribbon in a long plait down her back. She looked smaller than they remembered, perhaps diminished by the horrors of the previous summer, when she had so nearly drowned. Mrs. McLachlan, so much more than simply the children’s nanny—the family regarded her as a combination of best friend, sister, guardia
n angel, and the wisest and most loving person they had ever known. Her eyes shone very brightly as she gazed back at the family. In the silence, Titus poked his head round the pantry door and stared at Mrs. McLachlan as if she had recently arrived from Betelgeuse.

  “Don’t gawp, Titus, dear,” she said softly. “We don’t all need to see that you had three bowls of Miserablios and all of the Selkirk bannock for breakfast….”

  Titus’s mouth snapped shut and he blushed crimson.

  “What a fat pig,” muttered Pandora, appearing in the shadows behind Mrs. McLachlan. “I wondered where the bannock had gone. Typical. He always eats the best stuff and leaves the grot for us. I had to have brown bread for my breakf—”

  “That’s enough, Pandora dear,” said Mrs. McLachlan firmly, grasping Baci’s arm and leading her toward the hall.

  Baci turned round in the kitchen doorway and addressed her husband somewhat brusquely: “Luciano?”

  “Cara mia?”

  “Are you coming or not?”

  “Personally, I’d’ve eaten him years ago,” muttered Tarantella, pulling out a tiny lipstick from an abdominal cache and carefully applying it to her mouthparts. “Husbands,” she continued. “Waste of good lipstick. Talking of which, check out this new shade of lippy…”

  “Somebody, please, shut that spider up,” Titus demanded, to no avail.

  “…I got it as a pre-Christmas present from a delicious chap I ran into last week.” Tarantella ran a small black tongue over her glistening mouthparts and arranged her features into an approximation of a faintly regretful smile. “In his honor, I’m only going to use it on special occasions—”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Titus begged, rocking backward and forward in time to his words.

  “Now, what was it called again?” Tarantella murmured to herself as Luciano ran out of the kitchen and disappeared down the hall after Mrs. McLachlan and Baci. Unperturbed, the tarantula peered at the base of her lipstick with her multiple eyes. She emitted a deep sigh of happiness when she finally focused on the tiny label stuck to the lipstick’s cap. Looking up, she made sure that she had Titus’s full attention before saying, “Of course. How could I have forgotten? How singularly appropriate. It’s called Boy Bait.”

  When Hell Freezes Over

  For the first time ever in demonic history, an overnight snowfall had turned the mountains of Hades white. Blizzards crept stealthily over its blighted landscape, its swamps and sewage plants froze solid, and ice feathered windows in the silent slums of its capital cities. As dawn broke, Hades’ demon citizens awoke to a world they barely recognized as their own. Moments later, phones began to ring in furnace rooms across the land.

  “How many times do I have to tell you? This Is Not My Fault. Right, okay, keep your fur on, I’ll try again….” The duty demon rolled his eyes and put down the phone. With little enthusiasm, he crossed the furnace room to lay another fifty lashes across the back of the laboring troll who was endeavoring to stoke boiler no. 666. The duty demon returned to his seat and picked up the phone again.

  “Right. There. Happy now?…You’re still freezing?…No, I won’t…. Don’t be a complete cretin. Bigger whips would only kill the troll…. No—that doesn’t mean I’m some kind of namby-pamby troll sympathizer either…. There’s no need to take that tone, I’m only doing my job. Yeah. I hope yours shrivels up and falls off too…. Knobs on, yup. Uh-huh…. Drop dead, pal—” And with this cordial farewell, the duty demon slammed down the phone.

  However, the caller had been right about one thing. It was freezing. The troll’s efforts at firing up boiler no. 666 weren’t making a blind bit of difference to the ambient temperature, despite the fact that no. 666 looked as if it was about to melt into a pool of molten pig iron. To his continuing dismay, the demon could see his breath forming in misty clouds in front of his face. This was all so wrong, he thought. What was going on? Hell wasn’t supposed to freeze over. It hadn’t been designed to cope with ice or snow. Its infrastructure wasn’t built to withstand so much as a light breeze, never mind the polar winds now whipping round the demon’s ankles and blowing glowing furnace ash straight down the troll’s boxer shorts. Hell’s citizens weren’t designed to cope with life in a Big Freezy. The demon looked down at his own inadequate clothing—a thong, a black leather string vest, and a pair of flip-flops—and wondered how he was expected to make it back home without freezing to death. Even the thought of the walk back to his apartment brought him out in odd little shivery pimples.

  Minutes later, shivering uncontrollably, he huddled against the boiler, trying to tune out the howls of agony now coming from the smoldering troll, who had, he assumed, generously set himself alight in a doomed attempt to provide his master with more warmth. With little hope of success, the demon phoned first for a taxi home (line busy), a rented car (ditto), a chauffeur-driven limousine (no answer whatsoever); then, in utter desperation, he phoned the Hadean Bus Company in the hope of finding a bus that might take him in the general direction of home before his toes froze solid and snapped off one by one. On the other end, a mechanized voice informed him that due to unprecedented snowfall, all services were canceled until further notice.

  Snow fall? The demon’s brows plunged toward his nose, and his eyes squeezed shut as if to expunge such a hideous notion. It never snowed in Hades. That was unthinkable. And yet, as he opened his eyes again…there they were, little white flaky things dropping out of the sky, drifting in through the doorway and sizzling on the hot troll by the furnace. The demon swore loudly. This was simply not on. It was outrageous. Someone had to tell S’tan what was happening. Someone had to alert Him to the fact that His domain was on the verge of collapse. Someone—the demon swallowed—someone brave enough to endure the fiery blast of His rage when He was informed that He had a problem with His furnaces. The demon bit down on a squeak of terror. Whoever was insane enough to face down the ire of S’tan, His Imperial Inflammableness; S’tan, the First Minister of the Hadean Executive…whoever was brave and insane enough to do that would stand about the same chance of survival as…say…a snowflake in Hell.

  “Kinda sums it all up,” the demon mumbled to himself, keying in the number that hopefully, after many labyrinthine twists, turns, menus, options, and multiple choices, would finally allow him access to the inner sanctum of the Lord of Misrule, S’tan Himself. Perhaps it was an electrical fault, the demon thought, staring at the icicles that were forming on the ceiling of the furnace room. Or maybe the other furnace-stoking slaves were on a go-slow. As he half listened to the dial tone, a heretical thought passed through his mind—surely it couldn’t be that the fabled powers of his Loathsome Leader, his S’tainless S’teeliness S’tan, the Arch-Fiend, were failing? The duty demon groaned out loud. How could he even think such a thought? S’tan was invincible, all-powerful. He wasn’t going to fail…. His powers weren’t dimming like some kind of cheap battery—

  “Welcome to Below, region of eternal Punishment, everlasting Torture, and unending Despair,” the phone interrupted. The demon’s shoulders slumped. A recorded message. Gosh, what fun.

  “For barbecue with added fork-and-skewer involvement, press one,” the phone continued, its merry, upbeat tone at odds with the menu it was detailing. “For lies, lies, and more damned lies, press two. Ha-ha—only kidding. Press three…Or is that a lie?”

  The demon sighed. The only thing to do was hang on with gritted teeth until the recording reached the “speak to a real person rather than a machine” option. That was, if there was such an option. This was Hades, after all.

  “For fraud, bouncy checks, and armed robbery, press six. For Deadly Sins, press seven. For…”

  Using a none-too-pristine fingernail, the demon picked his teeth and waited.

  “For using a cell phone in a manner designed to alert anyone within a half-mile radius to the boring minutiae of your tedious life, press eight.”

  On the point of hurling the phone against the glowing metal belly of the furnace
, the demon was astonished to hear:

  “Operator services, how may I be of assistance?”

  “Um, yes,” babbled the demon, caught unawares. “Put me, uh, through to the Pit, would you?”

  “Would that be the Deep Pit, the Even Deeper Pit, or the Abysmally Profound Pit?” the voice demanded.

  “Uh…the Deep Pit would be great,” the demon guessed, confused by the range of options, pitwise.

  There was a click, a hum, and then the return of the ringing tone. The demon closed his eyes and was on the verge of hanging up when a voice spoke in his ear.

  “THIS IS ONE’S ANSWERING MACHINE,” the voice announced, its superior tone instantly identifying it as belonging to S’tan Himself. Before the duty demon could draw breath, S’tan, or rather S’tan’s answering machine, continued: “ONE IS FAR TOO BUSY TO COME TO THE PHONE RIGHT NOW, SO WHY DON’T YOU JUST LEAVE YOUR PATHETIC LITTLE BLEATINGS—OOPS, I MEAN, LEAVE YOUR MESSAGE AFTER THE TONE.”

  Then came an extended pause, during which the demon could distinctly hear the sound of heavy breathing, followed by S’tan’s voice, the volume lowered as if He were talking to some unseen person:

  “WHO GIVES A FAT FIG WHAT MESSAGES THEY LEAVE? YOU DON’T REALLY THINK ONE HAS TIME TO LISTEN TO ALL THEIR TEDIOUS WHINGEINGS, DO YOU? WHATEVER DO YOU TAKE ONE FOR? ONE IS A CELEBRITY, NOT AN AGONY AUNT. NOW CALL ME A CAB—ONE HAS A FLIGHT TO CATCH….”

  There was the sound of a distant door slamming and a hiss of static. Then came several electronic beeps and whooshes, a short silence, then a click followed by a woman’s soft voice enunciating:

  “You’re through to the Totally Toast studio at Bee-Bee-See, dot coh, dot You-Kay. No one is available to take your call right now, so leave us a message or send a fax after the tone.” And then came the unmistakable sound of someone, probably S’tan, blowing a loud and mocking raspberry.