Pure Dead Batty Read online

  Damp attempted a tentative smile and wriggled into a sitting position. “Show me,” she demanded, adding, after a second’s pause, “Please? Now?”

  “Heavens, ma’am,” Vesper gasped. “You humans don’t hang about, do you?”

  “Yes. Want it. Want to hang about.” Damp stood up, the bedsprings creaking in protest. “Wantit, wantit, wantit—”

  “Right. Okay. Calm down, ma’am. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that classical jazz. One thing at a time. If you want to hang like a bat, first you’ve got to learn toe control, right? Nunna that ‘This little piggy’ nonsense. I’m talking toes that’re just as happy picking up grains of rice one at a time as clinging to a windswept twig. Got me? Then we move on to headstands, yeah?”

  Damp nodded, her eyes gleaming, her mouth upturned in a wild grin. If she’d been asked what was different between right here and right now and the once upon a time of, say, ten minutes before, it was that for the first time in two months, ever since Mrs. McLachlan had disappeared, she was free of the big heavy hurt inside her chest.

  Lost in Time

  A chilly mist rolled in from the sea-loch, swallowing the shoreline and bejeweling the island’s few trees with pearls of dew. As the sun faded behind the mist’s gray veil, the temperature plummeted. By Mrs. McLachlan’s reckoning, today marked the beginning of the third month they’d been here. In an attempt to make sense out of the confusion of these days, she’d been marking time ever since they’d arrived on the island. At the end of that first awful day, when all was lost and she could barely see for the tears that threatened to drown her all over again, she had found a large piece of driftwood by the shore and carefully embedded it in the sand above the high-tide mark. Since then, she’d been arranging pebbles around it in an ever-increasing spiral, one laid in place at sunset every day. Her fellow castaway watched her in silence, picking his teeth with a sharp twig and huddling closer to their little driftwood fire. Mrs. McLachlan bent to place a rose-quartz pebble on the outermost arm of the spiral and paused, struck by a persistent but fading memory.

  A house … that was it … a huge sprawling extravagance of a house … surrounded by a pink sea of rose-colored stones, just like this one she was holding in her hand. Stone steps lead … up to a door which lies half open, inviting the eye into the shadowy spaces beyond. She hears the far-off murmur of voices, a peal of laughter, the upraised carol of children playing. There is warmth on her back, late summer’s sunshine turning trees to golden lace. She looks down to her hands and sees that in one she holds a silver thread, and in the other … a child. A girl. Not the little one, but her sister. She needs to tell the girl something important. To explain why she has had to leave so abruptly. To comfort the girl, for the child’s eyes have the bruised appearance of the grieving. Don’t worry, she wants to say, I still breathe. But the girl turns away and now Mrs. McLachlan is running, away from the house; the sky darkens and she is in woods, running and running; the light flickering on-off, on-off through the slender birch trunks. She is weaving a path, just as she weaves a silver thread through the trees. She must not let go. No matter what else is lost, she must not let go and lose the thread.

  The rose-quartz pebble falls from her hand to land in the middle of the spiral, clattering against the driftwood in the dead center. And now it is followed by a tear, and then another, for Flora McLachlan has paid a high price for her journey to this island. Her memory is fading rapidly with each passing day. The images of everyone she loved slip through her mind like sand through her fingers. Even the names of the children in her care have washed from her memory, as if she’d written them in the sand at low tide. She has tried so hard to bring their names back; but try as she might, she cannot retrieve them. Yet she feels their absence as an amputee feels phantom limbs.

  An exasperated hiss came from the direction of the figure hunched by the fire, and she hastily put the fallen pebble into its proper place on the spiral’s perimeter. There. Fifty-seven pebbles. Fifty-seven days and counting, wondering for what felt like the millionth time where on earth she was. Was she dead? She couldn’t be. Immortals don’t die despite their best attempts at suicide. No, she wasn’t dead, but Death was taking ages to answer her summons. In times gone by, Flora had courted Death by various means—not through a desire to end her life, but because suicide was the quickest way to call Death to her side. On previous occasions she had traveled light, with no luggage and no traveling companion. This time the journey had been entirely different, her traveling companion a demon and her luggage, such as it was, lethal. It consisted of one small stone, no different from all the myriad others on this island; no different save in one respect—that this stone had always been in existence. Always. With this stone the ebb and flow of Time began. The Earth in which it is buried came much, much later. Aeons after the stone, after the Earth had cooled, and long after the ice had retreated, mankind arrived and in its ignorance sought to pin a label to the mystery, calling the stone names by which they might know it: Chronostone, Pericola d’Illuminem, even Ignea Lucifer. In its name men spilled blood and destroyed countless lives, fueled by a desperate desire to own it, this diamond-like gem which, had they but realized, could not be possessed by anything mortal.

  The Chronostone was a neutral source of unimaginable power, in itself neither good nor evil; neither magical nor divine. Like a humungous battery, it could be used to enable the kind of spells and enchantments that could cause whole galaxies to implode; to make stars ignite and the heavens fall to Earth. The Chronostone could alter the balance between the powers of Light and Darkness, and for this reason Mrs. McLachlan had flung herself and it into Lochnagargoyle in the hope of depositing her dangerous luggage in the safety of Death’s realm. At least this had been her plan back then, fifty-seven days ago. Being immortal, she had anticipated washing up some hours later on the shores of Lochnagargoyle, mercifully minus stone and with a convenient but minor memory loss.…

  Unfortunately, she hadn’t reckoned on having a traveling companion along with her luggage. When Flora had thrown herself into the loch, she’d been accompanied by a creature which had issued from Hades, intent on killing her and retrieving the Chronostone for its Master. The demon Isagoth, emissary from His Satanic Majesty S’tan. Isagoth, the hunched and shivering demon who now huddled by the driftwood fire and moaned continuously about the weather, the lack of variety in his diet, the uncomfortable nature of his heather bed, the weather, the tastelessness of fish, his aches and pains, the weather, his recent bout of insomnia, the absence of toilet paper … The insufferable demon Isagoth, who by the use of his vocal cords alone was turning this little corner of a foreign island into a new Hell.

  Almost as if she’d spoken this thought out loud, Isagoth snickered and looked at her. He waved her over, patting the heather beside him, inviting her to join him.

  “Hey, c’mon, Flora,” he said. “Take a load off. Relax. Pull up a tussock.” His face creased up in a grin that seemed almost human—until Mrs. McLachlan reminded herself that she was sharing this island with a demon. Whether Isagoth was being genuinely friendly or fiendly was hard to tell; after so much time spent in the demon’s company she was becoming less certain where, on a moral litmus paper, black would cede to white. It appeared that even demons had their angelic moments, even if such occurrences were rarer than snowballs in furnaces.

  “Cold, huh?” Isagoth complained, hunching his shoulders and shuffling so close to the fire that Mrs. McLachlan feared he’d set himself alight. Staring into the flames, he sighed heavily, gnawed at a hangnail, and then, not waiting for a reply, said, “D’you know, I woke up this morning and for a moment I couldn’t remember my name.” The demon’s expression was one of acute melancholy. “Every day we’re here I’m growing weaker—more forgetful. At first I thought it was just the aftermath of drowning; you know, even for an immortal like me, that was pretty tough. But then I realized I was forgetting all sorts of small things: my shoe size, what I take in my coffee, the b
est route between Purgatory and Perdition—all trivial stuff—but this morning, for a second, I forgot who I was and what I was doing here. It felt as if we’ve always been here, with me staring into the flames while you play hide-and-seek with the stone.”

  At the mention of the Chronostone Mrs. McLachlan sighed. Here we go again, she thought.

  “You may as well give it to me, you know,” Isagoth began wearily.

  “Oh, dear me, Mr. Isagoth. We’ve been through this before, many times. I cannot give it to you. Not even if I wanted to. I do not remember where I hid it. You are welcome to try and find it among the many millions of other similar stones on this island. But even if you do find it, you won’t be able to use it—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because this place is out of Time; it’s, er, a limbo in which memory fades, powers dwindle to nothing, yadda yadda, blah, blah, blah. Yup. Heard it all before.” Morosely, Isagoth kicked at the edges of the driftwood fire with one boot. Sparks flew up into the air, peppering the darkening sky with pinpoints of light which flared and dimmed, drifting back to earth as smudges of carbon.

  “D’you know, Flora, right now, if I had a soul, I’d trade it for a little black cigar.”

  Mrs. McLachlan tutted disapprovingly. “Then, Mr. Isagoth, you must regard your present sojourn on this island as a health cure. Even though your soul is as black as pitch, there’s no need to have coordinating lungs.”

  With a heartfelt sigh, the demon climbed to his feet and stretched his arms up to the sky, flexing his long fingers and glancing at Flora. “I don’t think we’ll be stuck here for much longer,” he said gloomily. “I was supposed to return that stone to Hades no later than the autumnal equinox or … face the consequences.” Isagoth fell silent, his expression betraying just how ghastly he imagined those consequences would be. “I don’t want to go back without the stone,” he murmured. “It would be … messy.”

  Mrs. McLachlan tutted sympathetically, drawing her cardigan tighter around her shoulders; though whether this was against the misty chill rolling in from the loch or in reaction to the implied awfulness of her companion’s fate, it was hard to determine. Isagoth was in full flow now, lost in horror at his Boss’s fiendishness, his corrupt black-heartedness, his innate evilness, his natural-born malevolence—

  “What’s that?” Mrs. McLachlan interrupted. “Look, out there. In the mist.”

  Isagoth’s eyes narrowed. Surrounded as they were by a dismal shroud of gray, it took him no time at all to spot a faint yellow glow out on the water. The light bobbed and wobbled, growing brighter by the moment, drawing nearer until they both heard the dip and creak of oars and, finally, a faint voice calling, “Land ahoy. I say, can you hear me?”

  Ahead, the gray parted like curtains on a stage, drawing back to reveal a man standing in the bow of a black rubber dinghy. Behind him, two hooded figures plied the oars that pulled the boat to shore. Nearer it came, until both Mrs. McLachlan and Isagoth could clearly see what lay ahead.

  The dinghy was full of holes—its fabric rotted away to a perished mesh that was about as buoyant as a lead brick. The oars were full of worm, their paddles long gone, eaten down to two poles with which the hooded figures punted to shore. Mrs. McLachlan’s gaze skidded across the shadows that lay beneath the hoods of the oarsmen; shadows whose black depths she had no wish to explore. Instead, she met the familiar gray stare of the man in the bows, who extended a hand in greeting.

  “Flora, my dear. Enchanted as ever. Is it time?” And leaping from his ruined craft, Death came ashore.

  The Loveliness of Teenagers

  The morning following Luciano’s arrest dawned warm and sunny, lending an atmosphere of faint cheer to the devastated household. Sunlight glinted on the crystal glass of orange juice on Baci’s breakfast tray. Tiny rainbows danced across cream porcelain dishes embossed with tiny bats, dappling toast and marmalade alike and decorating her linen napkin with myriad speckles of color. Latch balanced the tray on one hand and knocked on the door of the master bedroom.

  “Moddom?”

  Silence rolled along the corridors of StregaSchloss, pounding at the butler’s ears, filling them with the sound of his own heart, its beat rapid after climbing the stairs between the great hall and his mistress’s bedroom. Then came a muffled sob and Latch’s thudding heart clenched with pity. The poor signora—he well understood what it was to lose a partner.

  “Moddom?” he whispered, his mouth against the door. “It’s nearly, ah, eleven o’clock …” He paused, uncertain how to continue, trying to rise above the sadness that threatened to overwhelm him. “I thought perhaps some breakfast—to fortify you for the day ahead.…”

  At the sound of renewed sobbing, Latch clutched the tray in both hands and slumped against the door, at a loss for how to proceed: sobbing mistresses and arrested masters did not feature largely in a butler’s command of etiquette. Suddenly the problem was taken out of his hands. Literally.

  “I’ll have THAT,” a voice roared, and before he could utter so much as a bat squeak of protest, Baci’s breakfast tray was scooped out of his hands: with a fiery blast Ffup barged into the bedroom, crockery clattering, toast flip-flopping to the carpet in the dragon’s haste to arrive, snorting, beside Baci’s bed. And such was Baci’s absorption in her own misery that she failed to look up and pay attention to the vast dragon who was hunting for a level surface upon which to lay down the breakfast tray.

  “Oh, please. Come on,” Ffup roared, clearing a space on the dressing table with a swift and catastrophic sweep of her tail. “No one needs that many moisturizers”—crash, tinkle, smash—“Come on, woman. Get a grip, would you? Quit wallowing and sit up”—chingg, thud, choink, tinka—“Here, have some toast. I try to avoid it myself, but carbohydrates are good when you’re feeling blue.” And reaching down to retrieve them from the carpet, Ffup sanitized the slices of toast by blowing on them, unfortunately forgetting to turn off her nasal flamethrowers. “OOPS!” she squeaked, dropping two flaming toast triangles to the floor, where they smoldered cheerily on top of an irreplaceable silk kilim.

  Standing outside the open bedroom door, Latch could take no more. Holding up one hand to prevent his eyes from witnessing his mistress in a state of partial undress, he rushed into the room and extinguished the burning carpet by smothering the flames with the first thing that came to hand.

  “My cashmere shawl …” Baci moaned, her grief over losing Luciano replaced, albeit temporarily, by a far sharper and more immediate anguish at the sight of her favorite garment being reduced to cinders. “No—no, NO. Please, Latch, use this instead.” Forgetting her vastly expanded waistline and perpetual state of nausea, Baci fell out of bed, hauled herself upright, and, with a moan of dismay, threw up on both burning carpet and cashmere with a commendable lack of favoritism.

  “Oh, heck,” whimpered the dragon as the first whiff of toasted vomit wafted past her nostrils. Staggering slightly, Ffup compounded the damage by leaning over Baci’s recently vacated bed and following her mistress’s example.

  “Blaark,” she explained incoherently, wiping her mouth with the scaly back of her paw. “I was just about to tell you-arrpfllll.”

  Latch closed his eyes in denial. No. Surely this wasn’t happening to him?

  The dragon interrupted his meditations with an encore. “Been feeling grim for a couple of w-halllp.”

  It was insufferable, Latch thought. As the last remaining domestic servant at StregaSchloss, he would land the unwelcome task of mopping up huey.

  But Ffup had the last word on the subject: “Looks like Nestor’ll have a wee broth-arrrgh, blaark.”

  Latch fled downstairs, slamming the kitchen door behind himself and leaning back against it, wild-eyed and panting. Such was his state of panic that it was some moments before he realized that an unknown teenager was giving him the thousand-mile stare from across the kitchen table. Titus’s head swam into view from behind the open door of the fridge.

  “Ah, yeah. Latch. Rand. Um. Me
et Latch, our, um, ah, yeah, well …” Horribly embarrassed at having to admit that his parents employed staff, Titus came to a halt and emerged from the fridge with a jar of mayonnaise in one hand and a baking tray bearing the congealed oven chips from the previous night’s supper in the other. A painful silence fell when it became apparent that Titus’s friend was ignoring this opportunity to be introduced to the butler.

  Shy, thought Latch kindly, bending at the waist in an attempt to make eye contact with Rand, who sat with his head down, face shrouded in a veil of hair, apparently utterly engrossed in picking at a splinter on the table. Latch sighed. Now here was a young man for whom the word sullen might have been invented. Obviously a newly conscripted member of Titus’s fledgling band, the appositely named Alien Brothers. Latch frowned, trying to remember who it was that Sulky was replacing. Unwashed? No, he left ages ago. Grunty? Yes. That was it. Dear Grunty. Runtlike in stature, that poor adolescent had barely come up to Latch’s armpits, but what he had lacked in height, he’d more than made up for in Neanderthal utterances. Drums? Bass? Or had he sung? Surely not, Latch mused. Singing involved words, and he’d never heard Grunty speak more than a single syllable at a time. What had it been again? Unnh. Yup. That was it.

  Latch’s speculations were interrupted by Titus, who was still trying his hardest to be polite, even if his efforts were accompanied by the gruesome sight of his semi-masticated mouth contents, which popped into view every time he opened his lips.

  “And yeah, um, this is Rand, our new, um, er—hey, just what would you call yourself, huh?”