Pure Dead Batty Read online

  “Hmm?” Sab managed to convey just how lacking in interest he found this bit of spider lore.

  “A cusp,” Tarantella insisted. “Which, in case your studies in astrology haven’t grasped such advanced concepts, means the point of overlap between two star signs; where the influence of both is equal—the word cusp coming from the Latin cuspis—”

  “Was that the doorbell? Again?” Sab’s voice was tinged with desperation. “No, Tarantella, don’t get up. I’ll go.” He leaped up and bolted out of the kitchen, the heavy slapping sound of his footfalls rapidly swallowed up by the vastness of StregaSchloss.

  “—meaning point, as in the sharp bit at the end of a spear,” the tarantula continued to the empty kitchen. “Or, if you prefer Pliny’s version, it’s the pointy bit at the end of a bee; its sting, in other words—”

  “I prefer Ovid, where cuspis refers to the sting of a scorpion,” piped a small rat, emerging blinking from the darkness under the dresser.

  “Damn,” squeaked an older, fatter rat, squeezing out of the cereal box and wheezing with the effort. “Do you have to be so revoltingly clever, Terminus? I can’t stand it when my kids make me feel like, feel like, like, duh—”

  “Precisely,” muttered Tarantella, glaring at the whiskery rodent waddling out from the shadows. “I rest my case. Like, ‘duh’? What sort of sentiment is that? And Multitudina, while we’re assassinating your character, when did you last wash? You’re covered in dust and fur-balls. Please. Do us all a favor. Go and ablute.”

  “What?” The whiskery rat stopped in her tracks and scratched her bottom thoughtfully. “What’s a bloot?”

  Tarantella rolled all her eyes and was on the point of delivering the final crushing verbal coup de grâce when from outside the kitchen came the sound of male voices raised in anger. Tarantella shut her mouthparts with a snap and scuttled for the safety of the dresser, from which she routinely eavesdropped on the household; occasionally calling in when she sensed the family had need of her wisdom.

  Like now, for instance …

  The Camera Does Not Lie

  The sound of the doorbell barely penetrated the master bedroom of StregaSchloss, where Baci Strega-Borgia stirred under a Siberian goosedown quilt that was as heavy as a meringue, three times softer, and probably impossible to tell apart in a blind tasting. Thinking of meringues made her stomach growl loudly, and she sent an unspoken telepathic apology to the tiny baby currently curled like a comma in her tummy—the tiny baby that was probably deafened by her digestive excesses.

  Wedged up against Baci’s rib cage, the baby narrowed its dark brown eyes. Whatever was she on about now? “Gabble, gabble, sorry, always have had an embarrassingly rumbly tummy, especially when I’m pregnant, dear wee baby, sorry it’s so loud in there, love you, can’t wait to see you, aaargh, I’m ravenous …” What a racket. When would Mama learn to keep quiet?

  Baci’s eyes sprang open. Across the darkening bedroom her husband, Luciano, had fallen asleep with a calf-bound copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment across his face. Baci sighed. On the off chance that Luciano might wake up and offer to make her a cup of tea, she sighed again, this time with feeling. Nothing happened. It was no use, she was going to have to get up. Bother, bother, bother …

  There she goes again, the baby groaned. Pressing its feet against its mother’s spine and wedging its head against her navel, it rolled around in time to Baci’s heartbeat—a maneuver that caused the majority of its mother’s internal organs to register their extreme disapproval.

  “Right, stop, ouch, okay. I’m getting up.” And doing a passable imitation of a beached whale, Baci rolled out of bed and landed on the floor with the grace and elegance usually associated with sacks of concrete.

  Finding itself abruptly tilting downward, the baby adopted an upside-down position and was just about to go back to sleep when it heard the faintest of voices whisper: “Scratchy jumpers.”

  Neither word made sense, since there was nothing in the baby’s world that scratched or jumped. Yet. What had caught the baby’s attention was the voice itself. Even though it was only just audible, it was crystal clear, unlike Baci’s muddled communications. Whatever or whoever had said “Scratchy jumpers” spoke the baby’s language fluently. Thank heavens—there was intelligent life on earth after all.

  The unborn baby’s eldest sister Pandora was hunched over a cauldron she had filled with developing fluid. The unborn baby’s other sister, Damp, was mentally adding developing fluid to a list of things to be avoided—along with scratchy jumpers, soapin myes, and hairybrushes; the new addition included after she had unadvisedly dipped a thumb into Pandora’s cauldron and sampled its contents. Now Damp sat in a corner of the darkened laundry room and thought dark, stinging, scratchy thoughts, while above her Pandora waited for her photographs to appear, as if by magic. In fact, Pandora thought, the whole photographic process was decidedly magical; starting with the overlooked and unlabeled birthday present she’d opened to discover that someone had given her a nondigital 35mm camera. When Pandora had examined it closely, she found the maker’s name embossed in the camera’s hidden interior:

  i-caramba

  it said, in tiny letters, reminding her of previous magical gadgets she’d come across—artifacts like the i’mat, the Multipli-muffin, and the Alarming Clock. Recalling these, Pandora knew exactly who had given her this present.

  Two months before, presumably after she had wrapped the i-caramba and hidden it with Pandora’s other birthday presents, the children’s beloved nanny, Mrs. Flora McLachlan, had disappeared into the waters of Lochnagargoyle. No explanations could be found for this, no suicide notes, and unusually, no body was recovered from the loch. To say that the family was devastated was to understate the full horrific impact of the nanny’s disappearance. Pandora still cried herself to sleep each night, only to wake every morning hoping that it had all been a nightmare. She couldn’t believe that Mrs. McLachlan was gone forever, even though each passing day served to reinforce a message to the contrary; for had the nanny still been alive, surely some word of her continued existence would have made its way to the grieving Strega-Borgias. There had been a brief flicker of hope when Titus and Pandora found evidence of the nanny’s survival engraved on an antique map; enough proof to lighten Pandora’s despair temporarily and allow her belatedly to open her birthday presents and find Mrs. McLachlan’s magical gift. At least Pandora assumed that the i-caramba was magical, even if she hadn’t yet discovered in what form this magic would manifest itself. Certainly it allowed her to take better photographs than she’d ever thought possible …

  … Like this one, for instance. “Look, here it comes,” she breathed, gripped, as she had been each and every time, by the wonder of the process that made captured light visible, by the alchemy that produced pictures on blank sheets of paper. Developing films and printing her own photographs made Pandora feel like a real photographer, but the chemicals necessary to the whole process had proved to be impossible to obtain locally. While waiting for more supplies to arrive by mail order, Pandora had been forced to send off several films to be developed commercially. As she looked, she saw that one piece of paper was floating on the surface of the liquid in the cauldron, a sheet on which an image of StregaSchloss was beginning to appear, its turrets and crenellations swimming into view in the developer. Damp stood up and tottered across the laundry room to stand beside Pandora, leaning into her big sister’s leg, her hot, wet thumb temporarily removed from her mouth to facilitate speech.

  “Up,” she muttered, remembering, just in time, the magic word, “Now.”

  Pandora bent down and scooped her up with some difficulty, since at two and a half Damp was no longer a small bendy baby but had metamorphosed into a wriggly, dense bundle with a determined agenda of her own.

  “Let Damp see,” she demanded, her eyes wide in the red glow of the safety light.

  “There, look. There’s our house, Damp.” Pandora fished the print out of the devel
oper and dropped it into the fixative, an even nastier-smelling liquid sloshing around in an antique soup tureen. “And there’s Mum, and Dad and—Oh, dear. Well, never mind, I can always crop that bit out. How did he get in there?”

  Damp leaned closer, examining the photo carefully before deciding, “Poor, poor Titus. Why mouth gone all funny?”

  “More to the point,” said Pandora, “how come I didn’t see him standing there pulling that awful face? Good grief, his mouth is the size of a mailbox and his eyes … What a complete moron. Surely they found him under a bush. Tell me we’re not related—”

  “Trees,” Damp interrupted, as if encouraging Pandora to stick to the point. “Trees got man in them.”

  Pandora dragged her gaze off the image of their brother-as-gargoyle and stared at a patch of deep shade indicated by Damp’s pointing finger.

  “A man?” Her brow furrowed. “Are you sure?” She peered more closely at a shadowy blur to the right of the ruins of the old icehouse at the edge of the photograph, but with little success. “Nope, sorry. I can’t make it out—or should I say him?”

  “In trees. Look,” Damp insisted, her thumb creeping closer to her mouth for comfort. “Hobbible man.” Her voice rose in pitch and volume as she continued to stare at the picture. “Not like it, that MAN.”

  “Okay, okay. Calm down.” Sensing that Damp was on the edge of throwing a wobbly, Pandora flipped the photograph facedown in the soup tureen and said with false heartiness, “There. It’s gone. The man’s gone now,” adding under her breath, “If he was ever there in the first place …”

  Temporarily reassured, Damp wriggled and squirmed in her big sister’s arms, until Pandora was obliged to put her back down on the floor.

  Vowing to examine the offending photograph later with the aid of a magnifying glass, Pandora tried to remember when exactly she’d taken it. In the print the trees were in leaf, her mother’s pregnancy was enormously visible, Damp was—Hang on. Her thoughts skidded to a standstill. Damp was wearing a swimsuit and her golden glittery wellies; a combination that shrieked Summer in Argyll. As Pandora’s body began to fill with ice, she remembered the day that Damp had insisted on wearing this striking costume. She also remembered her parents’ doomed attempts to persuade her to change into something more suitable. It had been the day when a professional photographer had shown up at StregaSchloss; the same day that Mrs. McLachlan had disappeared. A day that would be engraved on Pandora’s memory forever. But—she shivered—a day many weeks before the i-caramba had come into her possession.

  Therefore this photograph was impossible. It should not, could not exist. She must have made some sound, some involuntary whimper or sob, because Damp leaned heavily against her legs and gazed up into her face. Trying to disguise her feeling of mounting hysteria, Pandora reached out and turned the photograph faceup in the tureen—and caught her breath. She’d missed the most important detail in the picture. Her hands began to tremble uncontrollably. In the photograph, the front door of StregaSchloss lay open, the hall beyond too shadowy to make out much detail save for …

  Save for two figures in partial silhouette.

  A middle-aged woman, her shape so achingly familiar that Pandora felt tears of longing well in her eyes: Mrs. McLachlan bending slightly at the waist as she embraced a young girl …

  A young girl who, in the here and now, held a dripping photograph in her wildly shaking hands—a photograph that shouldn’t … couldn’t exist.

  For, Pandora’s mind insisted, that photograph had to have been taken weeks after Mrs. McLachlan had gone. Pandora had not possessed a camera before then. There was no possible explanation for—She blinked. There were numbers, very faint, like a date stamp in the corner of the print. At least, she could see an eight and a five, which would be about right. It had been the fifth of August when Mrs. McLach—Pandora closed her eyes and took a deep breath—and groaned. Repeat after me, Pandora, she told herself. There is no possible, logical explanation for the existence of this picture in my hands.

  The distant ringing of the front doorbell drew her back to the real world. Pandora opened her eyes and stared at the photograph. Looking at the tiny image of Mrs. McLachlan made her chest hurt. Slowly she slid the print back into the tureen and blew her nose on a nearby pillowcase—an action that she knew Mrs. McLachlan would have viewed with extreme prejudice. Pandora crossed the room and opened the shutters that had temporarily turned the laundry into a darkroom, and realized that the day was nearly over. In the distance the doorbell rang again; a long insistent ring, as if whoever was outside was growing impatient. Unaccountably, Damp burst into tears and fled across the twilit room to cling to Pandora’s legs as if she never wanted to let go.

  An Innocent Man

  The policemen stood shoulder to shoulder on the doorstep of StregaSchloss, with jaws firm and their faces set in the Police Academy–approved neutral-with-an-under-tone-of-menace expression.

  “Shall I do the honors? Sir?” the DS hissed.

  “Let’s just see who opens the door first, shall we, Detective Sergeant? No point in launching into your spiel if it’s not your man, is there? Keep your powder dry, there’s a good chap.”

  The DS colored. Obviously he wasn’t about to caution a member of the suspect’s family or staff. What did the Chief take him for? He was treating him like a moron, making out like the Highlands were policed by complete idiots whose heads buttoned up at the back. To which was added the injustice that this weasel-faced high-heid yin, this big cheese from Glasgow’s Serious Crimes Unit had just swanned in and taken over his case.

  Some of his resentment must have shown on his face because the blond Detective Chief Inspector from the Serious Crimes Unit raised his eyebrows and inquired in a whiny Glaswegian accent, “Who rattled your cage, pal?” just as the front door was opened by a creature that looked as if cages might have been its specialist subject—and no, it didn’t rattle them, it bent them like lengths of overcooked spaghetti. The creature stood about three meters high and appeared to be upholstered in well-seasoned dark leather. The policemen’s first impression was that the door had been opened by a mutant lion, but as the creature turned its back to them and roared something incomprehensible into the interior of the house, they all caught sight of a perfect set of wings in coordinating battered leather, folding back against the beast’s spine.

  This, of course, was before the crocodile appeared behind the policemen, its teeth exposed in what might have been a smile of greeting, but on the other hand, might not.

  Hands stole toward weapons; the DS, who was woefully unarmed, clenched his fists so hard he drew blood.

  Summoned by the leather creature, a boy appeared at the top of the stairs, gracefully slung one leg over the banister, and slid to the bottom, where he dismounted to slouch across the hall toward the front door.

  “They’re utterly harmless,” he said, following this complete fiction by turning to the two beasts and explaining, “It’s okay, guys. Chill. These are policemen. They won’t do us any harm. They’re here to protect us.”

  Unfortunately, in this assumption Titus was entirely wrong. As Luciano came downstairs, alerted by the sound of voices in the hall, Titus realized how badly he’d misread the situation. As he was to remark later to Pandora, it would have been a far better idea just to instruct Sab and Tock to eat the policemen before … well, before they went ahead and arrested Luciano Strega-Borgia for murder on several counts.

  “WHAT?” the suspected serial killer roared. “Don’t be bloody ridiculous. Do I look like a murderer? You’re making a hideous mistake.”

  The DS stepped forward, cleared his throat, and met the suspect’s astounded gaze head-on. This was it. The moment he’d been waiting for. All those years of training. “I must warn you, sir, that anything you say may be taken down and used in evid—”

  Luciano batted at the air in front of his face as if brushing off a cloud of insects. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Constable, save it for some real criminals.
Calm down. Now, come in out of the rain while I phone my lawyer.” Then he turned his back on the policemen and strode across the hall to where the telephone was balanced on a rickety pedestal table bearing the pockmarks of the battle it was losing to woodworm.

  “Da-aad.” Titus’s voice, which was passing through an unpredictable phase pitch-wise, chose this moment to swoop up an octave, causing him to blush horribly.

  “Titus, would you be so kind as to put the kettle on and make a cup of tea for your mother? I’d rather she didn’t come downstairs right now. No point in worrying her needlessly in her present condition.”

  “DAD.” This came out as a deep growl, manly and gruff, showing a potential depth of which, had circumstances been otherwise, Titus could have been justifiably proud. Luciano was raking through the table drawer, scattering woodworm-generated sawdust in a hunt for his address book just as Titus reminded him of the pointlessness of such a search. “Dad. Dad. Your lawyer’s dead, remember? Uncle Lucifer shot him? Come on. Surely you haven’t forgotten?”

  Luciano froze, shock and fear replacing his previous expression of mild annoyance. No lawyer? What about that one he’d known years ago? What was his name again? Loopy? Lido? Surely there must have been more than one lawyer down there in the offices of Slander, Defame, & Grabbit, W.S.? Did he still have their phone number? Granted, they weren’t criminal lawyers, which was probably what was needed: S, D & G were tweedy types with overtones of beeswax polish; decent chaps, the fly-fishing-off-to-bed-at-nine-and-up-with-the-lark kind, slow and methodical estate lawyers. The sort of chaps, Luciano decided with a sinking feeling as a policeman’s hand descended on his shoulder, exactly the sort of chaps who would rather eat their dusty law books than engage in the cut and thrust of legal debate in a criminal court. Nor, he realized, looking at his watch for confirmation, would Messrs. S, D & Grabbit be in their dusty brown Auchenlochtermuchty offices at 4:30 P.M. on a Sunday afternoon in October. Chances were, they’d be in the clubhouse of the Auchenlochtermuchty Golf Course, talking incomprehensible twaddle about mashie niblicks and swapping tales of the ninth hole. Oh, Lord, Luciano realized with a lurching sensation in his stomach, I think I might be about to spend a night in a police cell till this gets sorted out.