Pure Dead Magic Read online

  Signora Strega-Borgia choked back a sob and peered hopefully at the woman in front of her. And there, now, in tweeds and sensible shoes, sat an unlikely savior. Here was Nanny McLachlan, who brought with her a blast of bracing Highland air, a gale that might sweep away dust and cobwebs, put a gleam back in the children’s eyes, and paint the color back into all their lives. Or at the very least she would be able to rustle up a pan of fries that didn’t cause the children to make gagging noises.…

  The sound of labored breathing through the keyhole interrupted Signora Strega-Borgia’s reverie. “Latch, could you let the children in? I think it’s time they met their new nanny.”

  Latch opened the door with a tug, and Titus, Pandora, and Damp fell into the discouraging room, thwarted in their attempts to eavesdrop.

  “Get off me,” roared Pandora, “you’re tearing my veil!”

  “My fangs are caught in your stupid veil, let go of my cloak!”

  Squashed under her warring siblings, Damp began to wail.

  “Poor wee mite,” said a voice, “will she come to me? There, pet, what’s this all over your face, och, what a mess you’re in.” Mrs. McLachlan scooped Damp onto her lap, cradled her gently against her pillowy chest, and stroked her baby-fluffed head. Damp felt warm and safe. She plugged her lipstick-smeared mouth with a well-sucked thumb, burrowed deeper into that chest, and fell fast asleep.

  Blast, thought Latch, she’s got the job.

  “I’ve never seen Damp ever do that before,” said Signora Strega-Borgia in a reverential voice. “Thank you, Mrs. McLachlan. Now, Titus, Pandora, disentangle yourselves and meet your new nanny. This, my darlings, is Mrs. McLachlan.”

  “Hi,” said Pandora in a tone of colossal disinterest.

  “Bride of Dracula?” said Mrs. McLachlan. “It’s a bonny costume, dear, but did you know you’ve got a baby rat dangling from your bodice?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Pan!” roared Signora Strega-Borgia, losing her cool. “Did you let Multitudina out with her brood again? How many times do I have to tell you that I take a very dim view of free-range rodents.…”

  “Mum! Don’t start,” moaned Pandora.

  “Count Dracula,” interrupted Mrs. McLachlan, “you have retrieved your teeth, I trust? Your fangs are back in the fold? Will we see you for a bite to eat later on?”

  “Very funny,” muttered Titus, glaring at his shoes and avoiding eye contact with this intruder.

  “Titus …,” warned his mother.

  Slowly, as if he was wading through molasses wearing tennis rackets on his feet, Titus dragged himself across the carpet and extended a nail-bitten hand to shake. Mrs. McLachlan’s hand felt warm and soft, a definite improvement on the clammy-fish, nervous-nanny handshakes that Titus had been forced to endure of late. He risked a quick look. Mrs. McLachlan’s eyes met his and immediately crinkled up in a many-wrinkled smile. Titus shut his eyes like a clam and inwardly vowed never to grow old. He retrieved his hand and used it to readjust his slipping fangs.

  “When could you start, Mrs. McLachlan?” asked Signora Strega-Borgia.

  “I already have, dear,” said Mrs. McLachlan, patting the slumbering Damp.

  “But your clothes? Personal effects?”

  “Och, don’t you worry about me, dear. I have everything I need in my bag.”

  Something smells decidedly fishy, thought Latch, nobody travels that light.

  “That’s it, is it?” demanded Pandora. “You’re not even going to pretend to ask us if we like her?”

  “You might have asked, you know,” added Titus reproachfully. “I mean, I know we don’t pay her or anything, but we do count, don’t we?”

  “We’re the ones that’ll have to spend all our time with her while you vanish off to Broomstick Craft at the Institute of Advanced Spelling or whatever,” spat Pandora, fixing her mother with a look that could burn toast.

  Signora Strega-Borgia groaned. Titus and Pandora had become decidedly prickly since their father had left, and though Signora Strega-Borgia was becoming accustomed to their verbal spats, she found it deeply embarrassing to engage in all-out warfare in front of strangers, even if the strangers did invite one to call them Flora. “Latch, would you show Nanny to the nursery while I have a word with the children? Do excuse us for a moment, Mrs. McLachlan.”

  “Call me Flora, dear.”

  Trailing in their mother’s wake, Titus and Pandora followed her along the corridor and out into the light of the kitchen garden. Birds sang, bees droned, and a distant lawnmower stuttered, coughed, and stalled. The brightness of the sunlight made Titus screw up his eyes and scowl fiercely. She’s going to tell us that Times Are Hard, thought Titus. Again. And how We All Have to Make Allowances. Again.

  Pandora glared at the bald baby rat she’d unpicked from her dress. Bet your mother doesn’t drag you out into the garden for A Word with the Children, thought Pandora, bet she just bites your ear and tells you to get on with chewing electrical cables.

  “Do you have to be quite so obnoxious?” hissed Signora Strega-Borgia. When no answer came, she dug deep in her pockets and produced a pair of pruning shears. Picking on an innocent bay tree, she continued, “Every single nanny.” SNIP! “Not a smile, not even an attempt to be civil.” SNIP! “You’ve made it perfectly plain …” SNIP! “… that you’d rather they all just dropped dead.” SNIP! “What’s so awful about this one?” SNIP!

  “She’s … old?” said Titus.

  “So’s Strega-Nonna,” said Signora Strega-Borgia, attacking the bay with renewed venom.

  “But she’s in the freezer and she’s part of the family,” said Titus, desperately trying to think of more reasons not to hire Mrs. McLachlan, “and besides, Mrs. McLachlan’s boring. She won’t know anything about computers, and she’ll think magic is some kind of oven cleaner.”

  “Precisely,” snapped Signora Strega-Borgia, waving her shears for emphasis. “The last thing this family needs is Nanny Magic or Nanny Modem. What we need is an ordinary, straightforward, bedtime-at-nine and brush-your-teeth-a-hundred-times kind of nanny. And that is what we’re about to get.”

  “I don’t want a nanny,” said Pandora in a very small voice. The baby rat squeaked. Large, salty wet things were dripping on its bald head. “I don’t want you to have to go out to work. I don’t want you and Dad to get divorced. I want everything to be like it was before.…”

  Titus stared fixedly into the middle distance. Pandora had given voice to his deepest fear—she’d even said the D-word. His nose prickled and his vision blurred. No one had mentioned divorce before.… He silently willed his sister to stop. Whatever she was saying, he didn’t want to hear it.

  “Oh my poor Pan,” said Signora Strega-Borgia drawing her daughter close and reaching for Titus’s hand. “I know this is a horrible time for you both—you’re missing your father dreadfully.…”

  Pandora looked up into her mother’s face. In a voice devoid of any hope whatsoever, she said, “But do you miss Dad?”

  Titus froze. Pandora had done it again. Somehow she’d reached into his head and plucked out the very question he didn’t dare think about, far less say. His breath turned to ice in his lungs.

  Signora Strega-Borgia’s face crumpled, her eyes spilling tears and her mouth turning into a downward curve of anguish. “Yes,” she whispered, “every moment of every day. Every breath I take.…” Her self-control dissolved in a flood of tears.

  Titus exhaled in relief. Pandora’s eyes shone. Signora Strega-Borgia hugged her children tight and in return four arms held her close and four hands patted her shoulders, stroked her face, and wiped away her tears. Unnoticed, the baby rat made a bolt for freedom, loudly squeaking its disapproval of bipeds that leak.

  A Little Bit of Damp

  Damp was impressed. This new nanny could change a mean diaper, sing a tuneful (if wobbly) lullaby, and didn’t slobber at all when dishing out kisses. She’d watched Mrs. McLachlan folding diapers and undershirts and had noted with approval the new
nanny’s command of nursery etiquette. Teddies were stacked neatly on shelves, books were arranged in diminishing order of height, and all broken toys were placed in a basket for future repair. Damp’s tummy was full, her diaper dry, and her head happily full of recently read stories. Now, Mrs. McLachlan sat in a sunlit corner of the nursery and mended socks.

  Unobserved, Damp crawled purposefully toward Mrs. McLachlan’s handbag. She pulled at a corner of the bag and it slowly toppled over, spilling some of its contents on the nursery floor. The baby sat back on her bottom and began to explore.

  There was a book of the kind that Bigs read, no pictures, lots of pages; no, don’t want that, toss. There was a lipstick in a cracked plastic tube; no, did lipstick earlier, don’t want that, fling. There was a case that hummed quietly to itself. Intrigued, Damp reached out to pick it up. It felt warm as it vibrated gently in her hands. Turning it over—all the better to investigate—Damp unwittingly undid the latch. The case opened, exposing the keyboard within. Ahh. A piano thing, thought Damp, prodding the keys.

  QWERTYUIOP appeared on the screen, followed by a prompt EXCUSE ME?

  Damp pressed on, and produced !@£$%^&&&; unknown to her, the case responded, I DON…T THINK SO.

  To Damp’s astonishment, the background hum turned into a loud shriek. Damp dropped the case and did what any sensible baby would do under the circumstances. She threw back her head, opened her mouth, and howled.

  It worked. Mrs. McLachlan responded instantly. “You poor wee thing. What’s the matter, pet? Did something in Nanny’s bag bite you?”

  Damp flapped at the piano thing, now appearing to be having a temper tantrum on the shiny floorboards.

  “Ah.” Mrs. McLachlan paled. “You’ve met Nanny’s makeup case. And my heavens, it’s having hysterics.…” She picked up the case and pressed a key. Instantly the shrieks stopped, the lid snapped shut, and the faint humming sound resumed. “It won’t harm you. Really. Let’s put it away, out of sight, out of mind, shall we, and Nanny’s book and her lipstick, then you can show me round your house? You lead with the crawl and I’ll follow doing the breaststroke.”

  Damp set off, followed by Mrs. McLachlan.

  Night drew in at StregaSchloss. The wood pigeons fell silent, the air grew cool, and in the kitchen garden, the snipped bay tree wept tears of sap. A trickle of wood smoke from the Schloss chimneys slowly dwindled to a thin line, etching a message of embers and ash across the night sky. Bats flittered out from their attic roost, their wings beating a leathery tattoo through the mist rolling in from the sea loch.

  In the stillness of the moat, Tock ate an ornamental goldfish by way of a nightcap, belched a series of underwater bubbles, and dozed, dreaming of nannies and one-armed pirate snacks.

  In the Schloss kitchen, Marie Bain, the French cook, blew her nose, examined the result in her handkerchief, and sneezed wetly into tomorrow’s soup. She turned out the lights, hunched her shoulders closer to her scrawny neck, and sneaked along the passage and upstairs to her meager attic bedroom. In her stained apron she carried three cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and two cookbooks, in case sleep was slow in arriving and famine struck in the hours before dawn.

  In the dungeons below the moat, lumbering shapes wheezed and scratched. Chains rattled, clanked, and were still. In the background, a steady drip of water on stone tapped out the nighttime like a subterranean clock.

  In the wine cellar, a large freezer ticked and hummed. Deep within, in her bed of permafrost, Strega-Nonna dreamt of polar bears, creaking icebergs, and of the luminous shifting curtain of the aurora borealis.

  Upstairs, propped up on pillows, soundly asleep in a full-length white nightgown, Mrs. McLachlan snored. She slept too deeply to hear the traffic of fat little knees and hands, padding across the nursery floor in search of comfort.

  Damp had awoken to see silent fingers of mist pressed against the windows of the nursery. It was as if the sea loch had risen out of its bed and come to visit the Schloss, to peer in the windows and gaze damply at the sleepers within. She felt cold. She poked teddy after teddy through the bars of her crib and, using her activity center as a step, vaulted over the top rail and crash-landed onto the teddy mat below.

  The corridor between the nursery and Signora Strega-Borgia’s bedchamber was long and dark. Damp crawled by Braille, feeling her way along the carpet till she reached her destination. She paused in the doorway and removed several dustballs from her pajamas, then crawled full speed into the bedroom. With an effort, Damp hoisted herself onto her mother’s bed and tunneled under the sheets to reach the sleeping mummy summit.

  “Bog off, Damp,” groaned Pandora. “Take your foot out of my nose.”

  Damp climbed over Pandora and poked the next sleeping body hopefully.

  “Horrible baby,” said Titus. “Take your diaper off my face.”

  Ignoring her siblings, Damp pried her mother’s eyelids apart to check if she really was asleep. Two bloodshot eyes glared at her.

  “You’re hogging the quilt,” complained Titus.

  “I’m about to fall off the edge of the bed,” whined Pandora.

  “For heaven’s sake!” exploded Signora Strega-Borgia. “Whose bed is this, anyway?”

  Damp smiled into her mother’s face and settled happily in the middle of the bed. Her mother sighed. It was obvious that the baby thought that the bed belonged to her. Signora Strega-Borgia smoothed the quilt over Pandora’s shoulder, tucked a wayward strand of hair behind Titus’s ear, and curled herself around Damp’s small body. Around her, the children slept, safe in her bed, just as they had done since their father had disappeared. And just as she had done for the previous twenty-one nights, Signora Strega-Borgia lay awake staring at the ceiling, tears tracking silently down her face as she wondered for the millionth time where her husband had gone.

  Where on Earth?

  In a gray prison cell, a long way from home, Signor Luciano Strega-Borgia, father to Pandora, Titus, and Damp, temporarily estranged husband of Signora Baci Strega-Borgia, woke up with a shriek. “AAAAAAARGH!” And then, for he had a headache of monumental nastiness, “Aaaa … oww … shhhhhhhh.”

  His eyes roamed around his cell, taking in his floor-level view of four stone walls, one slatted bench, one solid door with peephole and lock, rather too many ceiling-mounted lightbulbs searing his eyes, and what looked ominously like a potty within olfactory range of where he lay.

  Things were not looking good, he decided, slowly getting onto all fours and then gently easing his stiff limbs onto the slatted bench. It was a potty.

  This is a prison cell. This thing throbbing and pounding on the end of your neck is a head. Use it, Luciano. Think back, he commanded himself, what was the last thing you remember?

  He’d been in a huff for some reason, stomping along the little lane that connected StregaSchloss with the main road to Auchenlochtermuchty. It was raining, he recalled, which was why …

  He was momentarily distracted by the sight of a cockroach climbing out of the potty and pausing on the rim for a spot of grooming. To his disgust, it appeared to be smacking its tiny lips.

  … which was why he’d been only too glad to accept a lift from the driver of the black Mercedes who’d stopped to ask for directions. The car’s windows were made out of dark-tinted glass, so he’d been unaware …

  The cockroach keeled over and, with an almost inaudible splash, fell backward into the potty.

  … that sitting in the back of the car was a man dressed in black, gun lying casually in his lap, beckoning him inward with a full hypodermic syringe, which was promptly emptied into his arm …

  … which would explain the pounding headache and brain-fuzz that made his recall of events so much more difficult. So that was how, but where was he now? And why? And who? Who had kidnapped him? He had the sneaking suspicion that whoever it was did not have his best interests at heart.

  This opinion was further reinforced by a ghastly scream from somewhere outside Signor Strega-Borgia’s cell do
or. “NO, NO, NO, scusi, Don Borgia, I so sorry I overcook da pasta, I never never do eet again. On my mama’s grave, I swear I never turn eet into stewed knitting ever again, NOOOOOOOO. AAAARGHHHHHH. Not the sharks! NOOOO!”

  And, disturbingly, another voice, a vaguely familiar voice, “Act like a man, Ragu. Pull yourself together, it’s not the sharks, stupido, it’s the piranhas, haa-haa haaa.”

  Signor Strega-Borgia turned pale and began to shake. Don Borgia? Don Lucifer di S’Embowelli Borgia? The most evil, heartless, amoral being ever to walk the earth? The man whose idea of a noble deed was to help little old ladies cross the street into the path of oncoming traffic? Whose idea of entertainment was rounding up stray cats and cooking them in a microwave? Whose childhood had been spent in torturing his half brother—his half brother Luciano Strega-Borgia—who was currently sobbing his eyes out on a gray prison-cell floor and begging a drowned cockroach to exchange lives with him?

  Yes. That Don Lucifer di S’Embowelli Borgia, and none other.

  E-rats

  Life goes on, as it always has. Worlds collapse, people go to war, divorce, and cause each other immense amounts of grief, but diapers still have to be changed, food cooked, and parents, no matter how unhappy, still have to go to work.

  Thus it was at StregaSchloss. Mrs. McLachlan settled in, Damp fell in love with her, and Titus and Pandora had to admit grudgingly that her fries were indeed crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle.

  Signora Strega-Borgia bid the children a tearful farewell and set off to complete her degree in Advanced Witchcraft, returning to StregaSchloss on weekends.

  In the absence of her mother, Pandora opened Multitudina’s cage door and allowed her pet rat the freedom of StregaSchloss. By default, this freedom was also granted to Multitudina’s thirteen offspring.