Pure Dead Frozen Read online

  Downstairs, Ffup had finally given in and was dragging herself at a snail’s pace across the great hall, taking as long as possible to reach the dungeons in the hope of not having to read “The Little Mermaid” to Nestor for the tenth time, and also in case the telephone caller had any news about whether Baci’s baby was a girl or a boy.

  “No, I’m sorry. The Signor and Signora have gone to the hospital tonight….” Minty turned round and made a shooing gesture at Ffup. Go on, the young nanny mouthed silently; then, turning her back on the dragon: “Yes. We’re just waiting to hear about the baby. Mmmm. Very exciting time, yes. Absolutely. May I tell them who called?” There was a pause while Minty raked in the drawer of the telephone table, trying to find a pen or pencil with which to take down the caller’s details. “Hang on a second…,” she muttered, hauling out a selection of dried-up old felt-tips, a nibless fountain pen, and several pencils with such impossibly hard leads that they didn’t so much write as carve.

  Titus, seeing an opportunity, seized it. “Look, here, hey…um, use this,” he said, vaulting downstairs and holding out his mobile phone to Minty. Her puzzled frown told Titus that she, along with his entire family, was a stranger to twenty-first-century technology. Probably prefer a goose quill dipped in ink, Titus thought gloomily, calling up the voice-recorder menu on his phone and passing it over to Minty.

  Understanding dawned. Her face brightened, and nodding to show Titus that she was now with the program, she repeated with exaggerated care what the caller was telling her.

  “Loo-doh Grab-it. Most unusual name.”

  This, Titus decided, was a bit steep, coming from someone who rejoiced in the name Minty.

  “Signor Strega-Borgia has your number? Great. I’ll let him know that you called…. Yes. Even if he doesn’t come home till late?…No. Not a problem—I’ll leave him a note. Tomorrow, late morning?…Yes. Consider it done…. You too. Goodnight.”

  Ffup’s wings slumped as she reached the door to the kitchen. There was to be no last-minute reprieve, then. No avoiding having to read “The Little Mermaid” to Nestor. Again. Silently praying that the new Baby Borgia would arrive in the next few minutes, Ffup continued her glacially slow progress toward the dungeons, where, had she but known it, Nestor was already fast asleep, taloned thumb in mouth, having given up waiting for his mummy nearly an hour before.

  Inside the cramped broom cupboard that served as the hospital administration center, the demon Isagoth was encountering some technical difficulties in getting through to his boss, S’tan. Unlike humans, who were required to sacrifice goats and initiate weird rituals involving candles, pentagrams, and incense, when demons wanted to talk to His Horned Horribleness, S’tan, First Minister of the Hadean Executive, all they did was pick up a phone.

  That, at least, was the theory. In practice, all calls to Hades were screened, and thus all demons had to work their way laboriously through a score of labyrinthine menus before even being allowed to speak with a fellow fiend. Even then, there was no guarantee that a phone call would ever reach its intended destination. Especially if, like Isagoth, one had the kind of pukka accent marking one out as a member of the Demonic Elite, namely, a minister in the Hadean Executive enjoying all the bungs, freebies, and privileges that such a position entailed.

  By contrast, on the other end of the line was an underpaid demon who’d just been forced to walk to work through the foot-high snowdrifts, black ice, and severe blizzards that were currently paralyzing Hades’ entire transport network. Frozen to the marrow, the demon was in no mood to be pushed around by some git like Isagoth, who, it seemed, was lucky enough to have been posted somewhere that wasn’t Hades, even if it was Scotland in winter. Out of spite, the demon shivering in the Hadean call center decided to be as awkward as possible, thus sharing some of the misery of his life with the overprivileged Isagoth.

  “Whaaaat?” he bawled. “Can’t hear yer. You’re breaking up, mate. Wossermarra? You on a train or sumfin’?”

  Unable to raise his voice to anything above a whispered hiss for fear of being overheard by the dreaded Blister Plaster, Isagoth tried again: “I need you to put me through to the Internal Offices of His Imperial Inflammableness.”

  Silence greeted this request—a silence that Isagoth didn’t realize was entirely due to the demon in the call center’s removing his headset, dropping it into a filing cabinet, and going off to make himself a cup of hot vitriol. All unknowing, Isagoth tried to appeal to the drone’s better nature.

  “Pleeeassssse,” he hissed from inside the filing cabinet. “This is really urgent. It is a matter concerning the stone. I must speak to His S’tainless S’teeliness at once. The very future of Hades depends on it….”

  Silence rolled down the phone to where Isagoth hunched over Sister Passterre’s desk, idly rifling through her handbag, wondering if there was anything edible, smokable, or even valuable in its depths. So far he’d found nothing of note save for a passport, two pounds fifty in change, an underripe banana, and half a low-calorie oat-and-prune energy bar. Isagoth devoured the banana and had just sunk his front teeth into the unappetizing prune confection when he distinctly heard the demon on the other end mutter something about an overpaid plonker who’d had the nerve to phone up and demand to speak to the Boss. At this, Isagoth’s blood pressure soared and a red mist appeared before his eyes. To add injury to insult, in the background he could distinctly hear the demon loudly suggesting exactly where his caller could stick his telephone, and at this, Isagoth blew a fuse.

  “Listen up, lard-for-brains,” he snarled. “When I said I wanted to speak to the Boss, I didn’t mean I wanted to speak to a stunted goblin with out-of-date cottage cheese between its ears—”

  “I BEG YOUR—” a voice broke in, but Isagoth was not for begging.

  Eyeballs bulging, spitting oat flakes and flecks of prune across the desk, he hissed, “You, pal, can do as you’re told for once. Get off your overstuffed rear end and put me through to the Boss—”

  “YOU’RE THROUGH TO HIM,” a voice informed him. “IT IS I. HIMSELF. OR, AS YOU WOULD HAVE IT—HOW WAS IT YOU PUT IT? SO QUAINT, SUCH AN ELEGANT TURN OF PHRASE…. AH, YES, ‘THE STUNTED GOBLIN WITH OUT-OF-DATE STILTON BETWEEN ITS EARS—’”

  “Cottage cheese,” Isagoth corrected him before he could stop himself.

  “INDEED. COTTAGE CHEESE. YOU, SCUM, ARE GOING TO LOOK LIKE YOU’RE MADE OF THE STUFF BY THE TIME I’VE FINISHED WITH YOU. ISAGOTH, ISN’T IT?”

  Isagoth’s knees, under their plaster casing, turned to jelly. It was S’tan on the other end. At some point that ghastly little guppy at the call center must have put his call straight through…. Oh, Hell’s teeth, Isagoth thought. This was disastrous.

  “I ca-ca-can explain, Your Abysmal Aggressiveness.”

  “THAT I VERY MUCH DOUBT. TELL ME, USING ONE SYLLABLE ONLY, DO YOU HAVE MY STONE?”

  This was not going at all well, Isagoth thought. He’d hoped to be the bearer of good news along the lines of Returning soonest with Your stone plus newborn baby soul, rather than the kind of bad news that usually preceded the death of the bearer—viz. Regret have failed utterly in mission to rescue Your precious stone and am returning for execution.

  “LET ME JUST REFRESH YOUR MEMORY,” S’tan continued. “I’M TALKING ABOUT MY STONE. MY CHRONOSTONE, COMPRENDEZ? WITHOUT WHICH I AM DECIDEDLY LESS EVIL THAN I WAS. THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS, YOU MIGHT SAY. WHEN I CHARGED YOU WITH THE TASK OF RECOVERING MY STONE, I DID NOT ANTICIPATE FAILURE ON YOUR PART. I NEED THE STONE TO RESTORE DOMINION OVER THE FORCES OF LIGHT THAT SEEK TO OVERTHROW HADES. NOW. ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING. DO YOU HAVE MY STONE, MINISTER?”

  Isagoth’s bowels turned to water. “Ye-e-e-s,” he managed, and then good sense got the better of him and he qualified this with, “Well, no. I mean, I know roughly where it is, Your stone, but I haven’t got it. At least not personally.”

  There was a long pause at the other end, during which Isagoth wondered if his translation into cottage cheese would be sw
ift and painless. Somehow he very much doubted it. No. Of one thing he was absolutely one hundred percent certain: S’tan didn’t do mercy. After all, Isagoth reminded himself, S’tan was the Devil, the Arch-Fiend, the Earl of Earwax and Prince of the Pit. Mercy? Sadly not. However, what S’tan did do was a nice line in terror, punishment, retribution, and revenge. Isagoth could plead till he was blue in the face, explain how his mission to find S’tan’s missing stone had been thwarted by the actions of one woman acting on her own—one tiny middle-aged woman called Flora McLachlan—but somehow Isagoth knew that no matter what excuses he offered, S’tan would be deeply unimpressed. Nor, he realized, was there any point in telling S’tan that His stone could be found amongst a million other stones on the shore of an island that had never been charted on any map in existence; Isagoth sensed that S’tan would be somewhat underwhelmed by that snippet of information as well.

  The only hope to which Isagoth could cling was that without His stone, S’tan’s power would be so diminished that He’d barely be able to turn pale with rage, let alone turn His failed servant into a particularly pointless cheese. Chewing with a mouth turned dry by fear, Isagoth wished that he’d chosen something a little more easily swallowed than an oat-and-prune energy bar for his last meal on Earth.

  “STILL THERE, HMM?” S’tan sounded…it was weird, but S’tan sounded cheery, almost playful.

  With a considerable effort, Isagoth swallowed. There, ughhh. “Yes, Your Gruesomeness?”

  “YOU’RE AN IDIOT, D’YOU KNOW THAT? A COMPLETE FAILURE. HADES IS FREEZING OVER BECAUSE YOU HAVEN’T BROUGHT MY STONE BACK. MY KINGDOM, THANKS TO YOU, IS CURRENTLY FATHOMS DEEP IN SNOW; IT’S BLOWING A BLIZZARD; THERE’S A WIND SO SHARP IT COULD SLICE BREAD…TALKING OF WHICH”—S’tan gave a little un-S’tan-ish giggle—“I’M IN A TELEVISION STUDIO RECORDING MY COOKERY SHOW, TOTALLY TOAST, SO FRANKLY, I’M NOT TOO FUSSED ABOUT WHAT’S GOING ON BACK HOME BECAUSE I’M NOT SUFFERING IN PERSON”—another merry S’tanic snicker—“WHICH IS WHY I’M NOT EVISCERATING YOU, YOU MORONIC LUMP. NO. THAT PLEASURE CAN WAIT. IN FACT, IT CAN BE POSTPONED INDEFINITELY IF—”

  If? Isagoth seized upon that small word as if it were a life preserver. “Anything,” he babbled. “I am Yours to command. Just say the word—”

  “AND THE WORD IS SHADDUP,” S’tan snapped. “ZIP YOUR LYING LIPS. PUT A CLOVEN SOCK IN IT. I HAVE A JOB FOR YOU. A MISSION. A CHANCE, IF YOU DON’T MESS UP, TO REDEEM YOURSELF IN MY SIGHT. A GUARANTEED PARDON IF YOU ARE SUCCESSFUL. I NEED YOU TO DESTROY SOMEONE FOR ME. AM I CLEAR?”

  “As crystal, Your Vileness.”

  “NOW, WHEN I SAY ‘DESTROY,’ I DON’T MEAN ‘DESTROY’ AS IN ‘DROP A BOMB ON TOP OF.’ NOR DO I MEAN ‘DESTROY’ AS IN ‘EXECUTE.’ NO GUNS, KNIVES, OR DYNAMITE, UNDERSTOOD?”

  “Perhaps You mean more of a mental and spiritual destruction, Your Nastiness?”

  “PRECISELY. DELIGHTED TO HEAR YOU BACK ON FORM, MINISTER. I MEAN BREAK HIM, CRUSH HIS SPIRIT, DESTROY EVERYTHING THIS MAN BELIEVES IN, YES? BUT LEAVE HIM STANDING. MY CLIENT WAS VERY CLEAR ON THAT POINT. HE SPECIFICALLY DEMANDED THAT HIS HALF BROTHER WAS TO BE LEFT ALIVE. ALIVE, BUT SO PSYCHOLOGICALLY DAMAGED THAT HE’D WISH HE WERE DEAD. THAT’S THE BRIEF.”

  Isagoth stared across the tiny room, his mind spinning with vicious possibilities.

  “SHOULDN’T BE TOO DIFFICULT,” S’tan continued. “ONE WOULD DO IT ONESELF, BUT ONE IS BUSY WITH CAREER MATTERS REQUIRING ONE’S CONTINUED PRESENCE IN LONDON AND THE VICTIM IS IN SCOTLAND, SO…”

  “Leave it to me, Your Vindictiveness,” Isagoth breathed. “Consider it done. Whoever he is, he’ll wish he’d never been born…. Er…Boss? Who is it?” Not trusting his ability to remember names, Isagoth grabbed the first thing he could find in the darkness and scrawled the name of Luciano Strega-Borgia in waterproof, super-permanent indelible pink laundry marker across the back of his hand. As he wrote Luciano’s name, he realized that he knew exactly who this prospective victim was. Luciano Strega-Borgia. The man in the parking lot with the no-longer-pregnant wife. Mr. Butler’s boss. And—Isagoth closed his eyes and swayed slightly—Luciano Strega-Borgia was also the boss of that infernal, pestilential nanny thing, that Flora McLachlan who’d got him in such deep water in the first place….

  It wasn’t until S’tan hung up that Isagoth remembered about the baby. In the heat of the moment he’d forgotten to mention that he’d found a newborn soul, ripe for the taking. Since souls were regarded as a superior form of currency in Hades—the demonic equivalent of, say, gold doubloons—it was to Isagoth’s considerable advantage that he’d stumbled across such a one. He had a sneaking suspicion that the baby might have some intrinsic value here on Earth as well. Therefore, he vowed, no matter how inconvenient it might be to kidnap it, that was precisely what he intended to do.

  Their Baby’s Deepest Fear

  The hospital ward was tropically hot, its thermostat set at a perfect temperature for raising orchids, nursing the old and frail, and overheating any visitors unwise enough to arrive dressed in anything more substantial than a bikini. Consequently, the tribe of Strega-Borgias and staff gathered around Baci’s bedside, all of them swathed in layers to insulate them against the freezing winter weather, were in imminent danger of melting. Furthermore, being adolescents, Titus and Pandora flatly refused to remove any outdoor clothing at all, and thus they stood, pink and perspiring, looking down at their new baby brother with expressions several smiles short of delight.

  Seeing this, Baci bit her bottom lip and tried hard not to cry, but Damp had no such qualms. She wriggled free from Mrs. McLachlan’s grasp, hurtled across the ward, sprang onto Baci’s bed, and burst into loud and inconsolable sobs. Titus and Pandora traded been-there-done-that looks and then resumed their identical expressions of faint boredom. Damp wailed all the more, attracting slitty-eyed glares from Sister Passterre, who was counting scalpels with an air of barely concealed anticipation. In vain did Luciano try to appease the wailing toddler; Damp was beyond appeasement, consolation, comfort, or even bribery.

  “…and because you’re being so big and grown-up”—Luciano rolled his eyes, acknowledging to his wife that he was indeed lying through his teeth about Damp’s behavior—“Mumma and Dada have bought you a lovely new tricycle.”

  “That old trick,” muttered Titus, walking away from the crowded bedside to gaze out of the window. Outside, in pajamas and dressing gown, was a man walking with the aid of two crutches. Despite the cold, he was determinedly crossing the frosty lawn, trying to catch the attention of two lumpy figures shrouded in thick coats, the photo IDs dangling round their necks marking them out as hospital employees leaving at the end of their shift. Behind Titus, Damp eloquently declined her father’s generous offer.

  “NO LIKEIT. No WANTIT tie-sickle.”

  And Titus was instantly transported back in time, all the way back to an August morning, eleven years ago, when—

  They’d promised him a tricycle, but instead they showed him a shawl-wrapped thing lying in his old rocking cradle. He’d looked out of curiosity and saw, under a puff of jet-black hair, a pair of navy blue eyes glaring up at him, surrounded by a pink crumpled thing that he hesitated to call a face.

  “Here’s your little sister, Pandora, darling.”

  So… that’s what it was. He’d turned away, but a banshee wail made him turn back. A hole had opened in the middle of the crumpled pinkness and deafening noises were coming from it. Titus watched with interest as his parents ran around like headless chickens.

  “Shouldn’t you feed her?”

  “She’s just been fed.”

  “Well…shall I change her?”

  Into what? wondered Titus, alone and overlooked.

  “Oh, I can’t bear to hear her cry like that….”

  “Well, do something, then.”

  “I don’t know what to do. We’ve tried everything.”

  “I know what,” said Titus, sensing a chance to become less lonely and overlooked. “Let’s take it back to the hostiple.�
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  As he returned to the present, Titus could still recall the look on their faces. Pandora’s arrival had been a turning point in his life, a milestone after which nothing had ever been the same. Sleety rain blatted against the windows, drawing Titus’s attention to the world beyond the hospital. Outside, the man on crutches had managed to blag a cigarette from one of the off-duty staff. Now he was hunched over, trying to light it, both his crutches abandoned on the lawn, a strange bright pink mark, or tattoo, on his left hand. He straightened up, took several unaided and apparently pain-free steps toward the hospital like a miracle cure in action, and then, spotting Titus staring at him, he spun round, loped back across the lawn, seized his discarded crutches, and turned to face the window. Despite the heat in the ward, Titus was instantly frozen to the core. The man smiled slowly—a vile parody of a smile: a leer, a sneer, more of a snarl, really—and then…

  “AoWW! My eye!” Titus yelped, jerking backward from the window, both hands flying up to his face in a belated attempt to protect himself. A white-hot needle of pain flared in one eye, as if a sharp point had been plunged straight into his eyeball. Tears streamed through his fingers as the outraged organ tried in vain to eject what ailed it. Blinded on one side, Titus couldn’t even open his unaffected eye, because every blink was automatically and agonizingly duplicated by the injured one.