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  A Boo at Bedtime

  Night fell over StregaSchloss, making the house look as if it were floating in the surrounding shadows, like an ocean liner far out at sea. Lit windows punctuated the vast darkness, and overhead the silent stars went by. A bitter wind shook branches of the wisteria against the darkened nursery window, where they tapped on the glass, flailing and tossing. In the warmth of the Ancestors’ Room, snug behind curtains of moth-eaten damask, Minty looked up from a recipe book. Was that a cry? Had Damp woken up? The young nanny was halfway down the corridor to the nursery before she remembered that Damp didn’t sleep there anymore.

  The nursery was covered in dust sheets, all its furniture huddled in the center of the room, the carpets and rugs rolled and stacked in a corner while the room was in the process of being redecorated to within an inch of its life. Well…perhaps not quite that far, Minty amended, recalling how Signora Strega-Borgia’s sudden enthusiasm for redecorating had vanished almost entirely upon the discovery of just how many coats of paint would be required to cover up five decades of smoke from log fires kindled in the nursery fireplace.

  “But I’ve painted it twice,” Baci complained, standing, brush in hand, in the middle of the empty room, gazing in defeat at her newly painted walls—walls that, despite her best efforts, seemed determined to remain the exact shade of yellow of a crocodile’s tooth, crossed with a color best described as that of a pipe smoker’s lung. Shortly thereafter, Baci had abandoned the entire project of preparing the nursery for the soon-to-arrive youngest Strega-Borgia, turning her maternal energies instead toward the bushes in her rose garden, spraying, mulching, and tenderly swaddling their thorny stems in what appeared to be miles of horticultural fleece.

  Damp’s new bedroom looked down on her mother’s shrouded rose garden, its wrapped roses ghostly against the deep and velvety darkness. A pale light shone through a gap in the bedroom’s distressed silk curtains, their linings tattered beyond repair. Like so many battered relics at StregaSchloss, these curtains were kept solely for their sentimental value: a long-dead relative had embroidered every silken inch with pale pink rosebuds, thus ensuring the fabric’s immortality. Possibly this was the same relative who had hand-painted the wallpaper in this room with her eccentric version of toile de Jouy: hundreds of perfectly rendered nymphs and satyrs, some gamboling round Damp’s walls, others pausing above Damp’s fireplace to wind daisies around the horns of a singularly depressed-looking Minotaur, the whole originally painted in a particularly aggressive shade of pink, which thankfully had faded with each passing summer. Snug in her first proper bed, Damp slept on her back with her arms above her head, the slow rise and fall of her chest barely visible beneath the pillowy cloud of her goosedown quilt.

  Minty watched her sleep, sure now that the cry she had heard earlier could not have come from this child. Slightly puzzled, she stroked Damp’s forehead, dropped a kiss into one little hand that lay unfurled on the pillow, and then, remembering that she’d put bread into the oven to bake, checked her watch. The loaves would be ready in a few minutes, and then there was that recipe she’d just found for pear-and-marzipan cake, which had looked so intriguing that she’d decided to bake it right away…. Head full of matters culinary, the young nanny failed to notice that she was being secretly observed by three pairs of eyes, all six of which followed her progress around the room as she pulled curtains tightly shut, picked up discarded clothes, turned Russian dolls till they all faced out, and at last left the door to the corridor ajar and disappeared downstairs.

  “Feee-yooo,” said a small bat, unfolding his wings and drifting down from the ornate plaster rose in the center of the bedroom ceiling. “I thought our cover had been blown for sure,” he added, landing with a thump on Damp’s pillow.

  “It hath to be thed that Mith Minty ithn’t very obthervant,” remarked a baby salamander, uncoiling himself from inside an empty candleholder on Damp’s bedside table. Damp wriggled round onto her tummy and ducked down to drag a heavy book out from under her bed. With a grunt of effort, she hauled it onto her pillow and opened it at random.

  “Oh, come on, Orynx,” complained the bat. “Couldya hurry it up with the ill-yoomin asians? I can’t see my wings in fronta my face.”

  Orynx slitted his turquoise eyes at the bat and gave a dismissive sniff. “You, thir, are a complete petht,” he stated. “You’re never thatithfied. You’re a bat, thilly. You don’t need a thalamander to provide you with illuminationth. You’re thuppothed to be able to thee in the dark.”

  Vesper, the bat, clapped one wing dramatically against his forehead and sighed. “Lordy, lordy,” he said. “If you aren’t the most ornery crittur I have ever had the misfortune to bunk down with—”

  “You two, shoosh,” Damp said, looking up from her book with a faintly harassed expression. “I’m trying to contrinsate. What d’you think? ‘Three Bears’ or back to ‘Snoke Ween’? I’ve got my Wellies on, so I’m all ready.”

  As they all bent over Damp’s picture book, trying to decide where her magic might take them to, a gust of wind rattled the windowpanes, and downstairs they heard a door slam shut. This was followed by Nestor’s wail echoing up from the dungeons—“Want Mumma…want my mumma”—reminding Damp that she too was temporarily mumma-less.

  “Poor Mama,” said Damp in a very small voice. “She’s gone to hostiple with Dada—”

  “YES!” Vesper’s voice assumed a tone of enforced jollity. “Isn’t that just great! We’re all so excited, aren’t we, team? Soon there’ll be a new baby! Won’t that be fun—?”

  “Yeah, great,” muttered another voice, adding, “Damp. What are you doing still awake? It’s sooo late.” And now Pandora’s shadow stretched across the room, joined to its owner at the toes. The shadow shrank as Pandora came toward the bed.

  Uh-oh, thought Damp, hope she doesn’t notice what I’m wear—

  “And why have you got your Wellies on? In bed? Just what exactly is going on?”

  Right, thought Damp, gritting her teeth. Distractor. I’m sure I can still remember how to do this. Not that I want to, but still…

  “And what’s that awful sme—? Oh, Damp.”

  “Waaaaaaah,” Damp said, slightly appalled at herself, but carrying on with diaper-filling nonetheless. “WAAAHHHH,” she roared, hamming it up, eyes squinched shut, fists clenched, and mouth wide open for maximum volume. “WANT MAMA. NOT GO TO HOSTIPLE. WANT MAMA NOT NEW BAYYYYBEEEE….” Taking a deep breath, she opened one eye to see how this was going down. Excellent distractor. Pandora was gazing at her with the kind of horrified expression she might have used if she’d found an eyeball in her soup. Vesper and Orynx, on the other hand, were staring at her with wide-eyed admiration.

  As Pandora hauled her bathroomward, Damp’s last glimpse of her co-conspirators was of Vesper giving her the double bat-thumbs up and Orynx glowing with pride on her behalf.

  Overlooked entirely in Damp’s deliberately staged drama was the picture book. It lay open on the pillow, its pages turning very slowly as if blown in a draft. Seeing this, Vesper shivered and huddled closer to Orynx. Images flicked past—illustrations of three bears, a wolf, a golden goose; then the pages would halt and the whole process begin in reverse—a golden goose, a wolf, and three bears—almost as if something unseen was riffling through the pages, searching for a particular one.

  “That’s weird,” Vesper whispered. “Whaddya think’s making them do that?”

  “I think thomething wicked thith way comth.” Orynx sniffed, frowned, and sniffed again. “I can thmell it.”

  “Well, don’t look at me,” Vesper protested. “He who smelt it dealt it. The smeller’s the feller—”

  “For heaventh thake,” the tiny salamander groaned. “I’m not accuthing you. I’m telling you. I thmell thomething obnoxioth. Thtinky. Offenthive—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I catch your drift,” Vesper snapped. “Cut to the chase, buster. What? Whaddya smell?”

  “Thulfur,” the salamander whispered, ad
ding, “the thent of demonth.”

  The picture book fell open on a familiar scene from children’s fiction: in the distance, a child in a red cloak with a wolf tiptoeing exaggeratedly behind her through a dark forest; in the foreground, a cottage—a face, probably a grandmother’s face, just visible through the upstairs window. Or was that so?

  Orynx blinked, uncertain if he’d seen something else out of the corner of his eye. For a moment there…but surely not? That was a child, and the wolf was reassuringly hairy, but the grandmother…Oh dear, no…Orynx’s eyes snapped shut. Grandmothers are simply not supposed to have red eyes and feral grins. Nor, he thought, are their chests meant to be covered in fur. And that wolf. It only had two teeth, long yellow curving ones, like a gigantic rat. Orynx steeled himself to take a final look to confirm what he’d seen and immediately wished he hadn’t. The grandmother had vanished from the window of the cottage—only it wasn’t a cottage now, it was a rotting, collapsing gingerbread house, covered in mold like a furry bruise, buzzing with blowflies and writhing with pale, blind worms. The child had disappeared entirely, but the wolf wore a hooded cape and carried a scythe under one arm. It was picking its way delicately through briars and thorns as if its burning red shoes weren’t causing it any pain at all.

  Orynx found himself unable to drag his eyes away, although every cell in his body was shrieking “RUN!” and his mind was demanding that he put as much distance as possible between himself and the unfolding horror of the picture book lying sprawled wide across Damp’s pillow.

  Then came footsteps, and a woman’s voice in the corridor outside.

  “Och, my wee pet, whatever are you doing out of bed? And Vesper, would you stop flapping around me like that? Calm down. Pandora, dear, you should have come and found me. You don’t have to do that. Diapers are my job. Here, let me take her.”

  The sound of Mrs. McLachlan’s voice was enough to break the hold of whatever dark energy had forced Orynx into being an unwilling viewer. As the salamander fled for what he hoped was the book-free darkness under Damp’s bed, the picture book continued to scroll through a nightmarish smorgasbord of the darkest episodes in children’s literature, each grotesque tableau trying to outdo the one that had gone before until the very pages of the book began to disintegrate under the savage assault.

  Orynx quivered under the bed, unable to raise as much as a candle’s worth of luminescence, each breath an effortful wheeze as he tried to master his terror. It hadn’t been the barbarity of the illustrations that had frightened him, it had been what they represented. Orynx had more knowledge, more personal experience than anyone at StregaSchloss of the depths to which demons could sink. Born into slavery in Hades, the salamander’s first memories were such a tangle of pain, horror, loss, and despair that it was a wonder he could draw breath. Orphaned, and regularly beaten, Orynx was pressed into service as a demon’s cigarette lighter from the moment he first raised a flame in anger. Isagoth, his master, had paid little or no attention to the well-publicized dangers of smoking, reckoning that since the darkness of his deeds was a source of pride, he might as well have lungs to match. At first, like all his kin, Orynx would respond with fiery ire to the lightest squeeze, bursting into flames at the merest pressure; then, as time and usage took their toll and his spirit began to weaken, so too did his fire. A squash, a shake, a vicious tweak: soon Isagoth would have had to resort to desperate measures to kindle Orynx’s wrath. Had his master not mislaid him, the little salamander would have had his fragile skull slammed against tables, floors, and walls in an effort to batter him into ignition.

  Although he was still only a baby, Orynx had seen his entire family and everyone he’d ever known used, abused, and ultimately thrown away. Orphaned, abandoned, homeless—throughout that time, every breath Orynx took was tainted with the filthy stench of demonic corruption, the sulfurous imprint of Hades. And now here, curling under the bed like a beckoning claw, coiling and twisting in the darkness where Orynx trembled and wept, was the proof that evil was once more trying to find a way into the heart of StregaSchloss.

  Enter the Reluctant Assassin

  Titus had headphones clamped over his ears, had his back to the door, and was too involved in the rigors of treadmilling to hear his sister come into the room. He’d just decided that music really helped him get through the awful bits, a discovery that he intended to share with his father just as soon as he came home—but that didn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon, given that it was now seven p.m. and Dad had been gone for about two hours…. Gosh. Probably right in the middle of having the baby—Nope. Let’s not go there. Titus upped his pace a little in an attempt to distract himself from thoughts of just what, exactly, his parents might be doing at that precise moment. He pressed the keypad on the treadmill again, increasing both the speed and the slope, and within seconds found that yes, music did help—gasp, wheeze—but…what really helped…more…phew…pffffff…than anything…was to…to…STOP. Ow. Oh, owww.

  God…oh, how that hurt. Legs on fire. Muscles made of one hundred percent wibble-wobble jelly. Why am I doing this? he wondered, opening his eyes to gaze in loathing at the digital display in front of him.

  DISTANCE TRAVELED, it informed him: 0.2 KM. Roughly the same distance, Titus calculated bleakly, as a trip downstairs to the fridge…and back. Except, he thought, cheering up slightly, round trips to the fridge had guaranteed calorific rewards, coupled with the added advantage of possible Minty sightings. Titus conjured up a mental image of Minty’s golden hair, her lavender-blue eyes, her—

  “Titus?” Pandora’s voice broke into his reverie, dragging him back from a blissful daydream of the beautiful Minty offering him a rosebud-tipped, white-iced cupcake from a plateful of several still warm from the oven. Take another, she seemed to be saying, but Titus wasn’t sure, as he gazed at her lips and wondered if he’d read them correctl—

  “TITUS!”

  Titus flinched and spun round. “What? God, Pandora, d’you have to sneak up on me and bawl in my ear like that?”

  “Whatever do you mean?” Pandora’s eyes widened in mock outrage. “I did nothing of the sort. I’ve been standing here for…forever, waving and calling your name while you, you dope, have been standing there wearing little more than headphones and an inane smile. I mean, for heaven’s sake, Titus—you look like a complete idiot, smiling at the treadmill as if you’ve only just discovered how beautiful it is…. Ugh,” she continued, holding out her hands, palm upward, and gazing in disgust at first one, then the other, “I just so can’t bear the thought that I’ve got the same awful flawed DNA as you. I keep hoping I’ll wake up one day and discover it was all just a terrible dream—”

  “Yeah. Right. I can imagine. Then you’d roll over on the straw and find that your snout was rammed up against the dear little curly-wurly tail of your identical twin sist—”

  “Ah. That’s better. Insult For The Day. Now I know it’s you. For a moment there, I thought that the real you had been replaced by one of the Titus clones in the freezer—but no, it’s really you, isn’t it?”

  Titus gave a heartfelt groan and half fell, half leapt off the treadmill. “Ow—my legs. What a beast. I don’t know how Dad stands it. Come to think of it, I don’t know why he even bothers.” Titus gazed around the room—previously the Chinese Bedroom—in reluctant admiration. The P’ing Dynasty furniture had been removed to the attic, and in its place stood several shiny machines, all of which appeared to have been designed with the express purpose of parting portly adults from their limbs and their money simultaneously. There was a leg-exercising machine, a bottom-exercising machine, a thing like a medieval rack that promised to do something nasty but highly worthwhile to one’s abdomen, and a couple of machines to tear one’s arms off if the other machines hadn’t proved vicious enough. In the fireplace was an exercise bike, and blocking the window recess was the machine Titus had attempted: the treadmill.

  Dotted around the carpet was the workmanlike assortment of wrenches, ham
mers, screwdrivers, and assembly instructions that had occupied Luciano’s every waking moment for the previous weeks. Little by little and bit by bit, he had built his home gymnasium from the carpet up, much to the puzzlement of his children, who had rarely seen their father use a screwdriver or—heaven forbid—exercise his muscles in the pursuit of anything other than sculling a boat out into the middle of Lochnagargoyle, all the better to admire the sunset. However, what Luciano had omitted to tell his children was that, concealed beneath the leather bench of the machine that resembled a medieval rack, there was a gun safe, where he had secreted a recently purchased double-barreled shotgun and a selection of ammunition sufficient to rid Argyll of its entire deer population—plus a brace of gamekeepers, should Luciano’s aim prove to be as appalling as he suspected it might be. Pacifist, peacenik, and lifetime supporter of Amnesty International, Luciano sincerely hoped never to have to resort to removing the gun from its secret cache. Even holding it filled him with feelings of dread: he loathed its stink of gun oil, detested its cold weight in his arms, and reeled at the weapon’s potential for harm, for ruining lives and destroying hopes in one brief, blinding blast. Notwithstanding all that, he had gone ahead and bought it, along with its required ammunition; bought it from a terribly well-spoken chap who had managed to confer a bizarre air of respectability to the whole sordid business of purchasing a weapon built to turn flesh and bone into so much lifeless pulp.

  “Think of it as a necessary evil,” the family lawyer had instructed him, seeing Luciano’s face blanch at the prospect of ever using his new and loathsome purchase. “All right, then. Think of it as self-defense. What else are you going to do? Reason with the murderers who are coming to destroy not only you, but your family as well?”

  Luciano had glared across the desk at Ludo Grabbit. The lawyer’s craggy features were arranged into an expression that somehow managed to convey true empathy allied with extreme frustration.