Pure Dead Magic Read online

  A voice spoke. A friendly, furry, almost familiar voice. “Damplette!” it said. “Little Dampy-Pops! She of the diapered derriere. Oh, the trouble I’ve had trying to find you. I’ve been to banks in Bogotá, nuclear bunkers in Nevada, supermarkets in Surrey, and it was by sheer chance that I fancied some fettuccine with flies for lunch and found you here.… My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to return you to your siblings who, even as we dangle here on the World Wide Web, are sitting weeping, willing your safe return, wailing, and waiting to welcome you home.”

  Damp opened her eyes for a quick peek at the owner of the voice. Overhead, a gigantic spider smiled down at her. Damp instantly squeezed both eyes shut.

  “Awww. C’mon, small,” Tarantella coaxed. “I know I’ve got eight legs and probably more hair than you’ve had in your lifetime, but really, I’m on your side.” She patted Damp’s head reassuringly.

  Damp flinched and squeezed her eyes even tighter shut.

  “Oooh, baby,” crooned Tarantella, “how about a lullaby?”

  Poor little Damper,

  squashed in a Pamper,

  shrunk to the size of a bug.

  Along came a spider

  and dangled beside her

  and gave her a huge hairy hug.

  Damp burst into tears.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Sorrysorrysorry,” cried Tarantella. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. Don’t cry, you’ll short-circuit the Web. C’mon, pet, just think of me as a black woolly rug, and climb on board.…”

  A little howl escaped Damp’s lips.

  “Oh dear. Desperate measures for desperate times,” muttered Tarantella, beginning to spin.

  Damp sat, eyes squinched shut, mouth compressed to a rosebud pucker, trying to ignore the fact that she was being steadily wrapped in spider silk.

  “The problem with the younger generation …,” panted Tarantella as she spun around the baby, “… is that you still buy into that Miss Muffet stuff. Haven’t you heard of Charlotte’s Web, or James and the Giant Peach?” She stood back to admire her handiwork. “Purrfect,” she crooned, tucking the silk-swaddled baby under one leg. “And now …”

  She stepped backward, onto the cyberspace equivalent of the fast lane, and was immediately swallowed up in traffic. “WHEEEEEEEE!”

  They crossed continents, traversed oceans, and navigated through outer space, and one hour later, at an indecent speed, were bounced into StregaSchloss. Crawling out of the modem and into the CD-ROM, Tarantella paused in the drawer and listened.

  She could make out two voices. The one belonging to Titus sounded breathless and scared. The other, unknown, sounded aggressive and very close at hand. It said, “Buon giorno, Titus. Your uncle Lucifer sends you this greeting.” A loud bang and a scream convinced the spider that she should stay where she was. Chewing thoughtfully on the speck of fly wing that she had dropped on her outward journey, Tarantella looked down at her cocooned charge. Damp was oblivious to her surroundings and had fallen asleep during the journey home. The spider was no stranger to motherhood, even if the child appeared to be short of six legs. She patted Damp with a hairy leg, hugged her closer, and settled down to wait until it was safe to emerge. Beneath her, the circuitry in the computer sprang to life. Without a manual or even a Help directory, Tarantella had fixed Titus’s computer problem. She’d simply eaten it.

  A Gory Bit

  No sounds penetrated the walls of the dungeon at StregaSchloss. It was here, amid the restful drip of water on stone, that Latch frequently took his afternoon nap. Stretched out on a pile of straw, with the day’s paper across his face, he was blissfully unaware that StregaSchloss was under siege.

  Nearby, Sab was too involved with his own discomfort to notice anything amiss. His stomach growled and rumbled, trying vainly to digest the previous night’s smocked hiccup.

  In a far corner, Ffup groaned in his sleep. The dragon had staggered back to his bed in the dungeon, aware that he might be in disgrace after his earlier bombing mission had buried a visitor to StregaSchloss under a mound of green goo.

  On Sab’s return dungeonward, he’d found Tock on the Schloss doorstep, polishing off the remains of Ffup’s goo and complaining about the lumpy bits. The crocodile smacked his lips and paused to remove machine-gun fragments from between his teeth. The shredded remains of a black suit littering the moatside seemed to indicate that Tock had found a pudding to follow his main course.

  “Great sauce, this,” he had said, “but could we sieve out the metal bits next time?”

  Just remembering this conversation was enough to make Sab’s stomach churn. Rolling his eyes to the ceiling, the griffin turned himself back into stone. Instantly all activity in his stomach ceased. A slow smile spread across his granite muzzle. His thoughts turned to mountaintops, to pebbles and basalt. Latch’s snores and the steady drip of water down the dungeon walls faded from the griffin’s consciousness.

  A shadow fell across the bars of the open cage. A shadow cast by a figure dressed in black who was tiptoeing down the dungeon stairs. The figure muttered to himself, cursing as his feet slipped on the mossy stone and he found himself slithering down the remainder of the stairs on his bottom. He arrived at the foot of the stairs, gun clutched in both hands, eyes wide with terror. Staggering to his feet, he blinked in an attempt to see anything in the darkness. “What kind of a place is this?” he asked himself. The echo answered, This? This? This?

  Shifting his gun into one hand, he fumbled forward, using his other hand to feel along the walls. It wasn’t long before his trembling fingers found the granite griffin. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he could pick out individual features—the flared nostrils, the leonine mane, and the eyeballs frozen in their upward roll.

  “The things people keep in their cellars,” he remarked, peering closely at Sab. “Who in their right mind would want to hang on to an ugly brute like you, pal?”

  You pal, you pal, you pal, the echo agreed. Assuming incorrectly that the dungeon offered no threat whatsoever, the hireling tucked his gun in a holster under his armpit and leaned back against the griffin like someone waiting for a passing bus. Furthering this impression of a relaxed commuter, he dangled a cigarette between his lips and rooted in his jacket for a light. He found a single match wedged in the fluff at the bottom of a pocket and searched for a bit of dry stone to strike it on. Reaching upward, he dragged the match across Sab’s eyeball. As the match ignited, the griffin appeared to undergo a magical transformation from stone to battered leather. Leather that moved. Leather that reached downward, and with a brief crunch, neatly removed the hireling’s head and spat it across the dungeon. The head landed on the floor beside Latch, its severed nerves and sinews causing it to wink in a horribly lifelike fashion.

  The remainder crumpled at the knees and pitched forward onto the dungeon floor. The lit match dropped from a lifeless hand and fizzled out on the floor. Latch awoke from a dream into a nightmare. Lifting the newspaper from his face, he found himself eyeball to eyeball with the head of a headless corpse. A trail of blood led to the corpse, which lay leaking gorily under the griffin. Sab looked up at the dungeon ceiling and tried to whistle.

  Latch noted that the griffin’s mouth was suspiciously red and shiny. Bloody, in fact. “Sab?” Latch’s voice came out as a squeak. “What have you done?”

  The griffin stopped whistling and looked down. “Aaaargh!” he screamed. “Help! MURDER! Where did that come from?” He looked sideways at Latch to see how this was going down. Latch glared at him.

  “It’s a put-up job!” wailed Sab. “I’ve been framed! I’m an innocent bystander! How could you believe that I could do such a thing?”

  “Because you’ve got blood running down your chin,” Latch said grimly.

  “Have I?” Sab patted his mouth. “Oh heck, so I have.…”

  “Well?” said Latch. “What happened?”

  “He asked for it,” said the griffin, folding his arms and trying to look mean.

 
; “What? He actually said, ‘Please, dear griffin, if you’re not doing anything too important, could you possibly bite my head off?’ “Latch began to lay pages of his newspaper on the floor in an attempt to mop up the blood.

  “Well … not in so many words,” said Sab, avoiding eye contact. “But I knew he was Up to No Good. Check out the gun in his armpit. Really—you’d have done the same yourself.”

  “Somehow, I very much doubt it,” Latch said under his breath. “Stay here. Don’t move a muscle. I’m going to find Mrs. McLachlan.”

  As the sound of his footsteps faded away, Sab stood, as instructed, still as a statue. Leathery hide turned back into stone as the griffin retreated into the state from which he’d been so rudely interrupted. At his feet, the headless gangster resembled a human sacrifice, slain to appease the appetite of an unkind god.

  Chilled Attila

  Drooling in the kitchen garden, Knot decided that today was his lucky day. He peered through the kitchen window to check that It was really there. First the discovery of Marie Bain’s furry slippers discarded by the range, and now this.…

  In the kitchen, Mrs. McLachlan remonstrated with the malodorous bunny as he tied her to a chair with a length of clothesline. “That knot will never do, dear,” she said. “Far too easy to undo. Try a double half-hitch-clove-hangman. Much more secure, don’t you think?”

  “Shut up,” muttered the bunny, adding another granny knot to a chain of knots that dangled like loose knitting from Mrs. McLachlan’s hands.

  “If you don’t mind me saying, dear—”

  “I do. Shut up, would you?”

  “It’s for your own good, dear. Something your mother forgot to tell you—”

  “Shut up, woman, or I’ll gag you.”

  “As I was trying to say, dear, you mustn’t shun soap and water. A bath once a day might not be amiss, either. Oh dear, how can I put this without causing offense? Could you not stand quite so close to me, dear, it’s just that you … smell rather strange.”

  From the other side of the window, Knot nodded in agreement. Deliciously strange, he thought, rancidly yummy, in fact. With a little whimper of anticipation, the yeti burst into the kitchen, spraying a mist of drool around himself. The rabbit turned round just in time to see the yeti lumbering toward him, arms outstretched.

  “WHAT the … ?” he screamed as Knot grabbed him with both paws, stuffed him headfirst into his dripping mouth, and poked his thrashing feet in afterward with both thumbs.

  “Oh, Knot …,” said Mrs. McLachlan sadly. “How could you?”

  The yeti gulped apologetically and gazed at Mrs. McLachlan with sorrowful eyes.

  “After being so ill this morning, dear. You really should give your tummy time to recover.…”

  The yeti gave a small belch and tried to look chastened. Mrs. McLachlan wriggled and squirmed in her seat. “We’ve got a problem at StregaSchloss, Knot,” she explained as she flexed and strained at the knotted clothesline. Her feet came undone, closely followed by both hands. “Unwelcome guests. My horoscope was quite right about that, except it isn’t lice, it’s a particularly vicious kind of rat.”

  She stood up, the clothesline falling to the floor in coils. “There isn’t time to put down poison for this kind of rat, is there?”

  The yeti shook his head in what he hoped was an intelligent fashion. He could have turned cartwheels for all the notice Mrs. McLachlan took of him.

  “NO,” she said, opening her large handbag and rummaging in its depths. “No, Knot, we have to STAMP the vermin out. Eradicate them. Exterminate them. Wipe them off the face of the planet. There’s only one thing for it …”

  Her eyes have gone all funny, Knot thought. Wish I knew what she was on about.

  “We need to take them by surprise,” continued Mrs. McLachlan. “Can’t very well just barge in through the door, can we? They’d hear us coming.”

  Turning her back on Knot to shield her secret from him, Mrs. McLachlan withdrew a small case from her handbag. I’m really left with no alternative, she decided, unclipping its lid to reveal the keyboard beneath. This situation is outside of my job description, and regrettably I have to use all the powers at my disposal to put it to rights. Even if those include the use of magic.

  With a grim little smile, she scanned the kitchen for a suitable candidate for the case’s transformative powers. Deciding on the upright freezer, she opened its door and propped her case on top of a bag of frozen chicken legs. The exposed keyboard began to frost over. Mrs. McLachlan began to type: F.R.E.E.Z.E.R. Her fingertips left thawed impressions on the frosty keys. Pressing a key named REPLACE, she then typed: S.E.C.R.E.T. P.A.S.S.A.G.E. On a miniature screen on the reverse side of the open lid the prompt appeared: FROM KITCHEN TO WHERE?

  Mrs. McLachlan didn’t hesitate. Her fingers a blur on the keyboard, she typed: T.O. T.I.T.U.S.….S. B.E.D.R.O.O.M.

  “Please, please, let this not bring the kitchen wall crashing down around our ears,” Mrs. McLachlan begged, and holding her breath, she pressed ENTER, snatched her chilly case from the frozen embrace of the chicken legs, and slammed the freezer door shut. There was a muffled explosion, the sound of passages opening up in StregaSchloss where no passages existed before. There was a distant grinding noise and then silence, save for the dripping sound of Knot’s drool pattering on the kitchen floor. Hearing the sound of approaching footsteps from the direction of the dungeon, Mrs. McLachlan slipped the case into her pocket and hid in the pantry.

  Latch ran into the kitchen, leaving a trail of bloody footprints across the floor. “Mrs. McL … Flora,” he hissed in a piercing whisper.

  Multitudina bolted out of the pantry, followed by Mrs. McLachlan. She stared at the trail of blood behind the butler, took in his startled expression and pale face, and instantly understood.

  “You have the look of a man who has just found something exceedingly nasty in the dungeon,” she stated.

  “Sab beheaded somebody downstairs.” Latch shuddered. “It … he … he had a gun.”

  “Knot ate the one that was tying me to a chair in the kitchen. He, too, had a gun.” Mrs. McLachlan swallowed. “We have a problem.”

  “Several, I imagine,” Latch agreed.

  “There’s probably more of them and they’re undoubtedly armed,” said Mrs. McLachlan, stroking the case in her pocket.

  “Where are the children?” Latch’s voice rose to a shriek.

  “That is what we’re going to find out,” muttered Mrs. McLachlan, opening the freezer door.

  Inside, a narrow staircase wound its way upward into darkness. Knot stared after them in some confusion. Why keep a staircase in the freezer? he wondered dimly. And, more to the point, where did the chicken legs go? Also in a state of some confusion, Latch bleated, “Since when was there a secret pass …?” Mrs. McLachlan cut this short by dragging Latch by the hand into the transformed freezer and pushing him ahead of herself, upstairs.

  Knot shuffled forward, sniffing Latch’s trail of bloody footprints more from habit than appetite. From upstairs came the faint stutter of gunfire. The door to the secret passage was shut firmly in his face.

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

  Two rolls of soggy toilet paper later, Pandora decided that she’d cried enough to last her entire lifetime. She quietly opened the bathroom door and sought refuge in her bedroom.

  Finding her mother drunk and seeing her brother in tears had completely shattered her belief in her family. Nothing could ever be the same again. They had all been so happy … once upon a time.

  Hadn’t they? Her parents had seemed to love each other, or was that just wishful thinking? Pandora needed reassurance desperately, she needed to see proof positive that there had been happiness, that they had been a family. Then, perhaps, she could find a path back to better times … a way to turn the clock back. She hunted along her bookshelves until she found a photograph album that she had shrunk earlier to the size of a thumbnail.

  Clumsily leafing through the tin
y book, she came across a recent photograph taken on Damp’s first birthday. Peering at the minute picture, she could just about pick out the family group, their pinhead-sized faces gathered round a birthday cake the size of a crumb.

  They all looked so small … so far away.

  They’d been a family then, Pandora thought miserably, observing the microscopic smiles, the air of happiness that permeated the photograph. Two months ago. Only two months and a world can turn itself inside out and upside down. Two months ago, Dad was still around, Damp was just an ordinary-sized baby, and Mrs. McLachlan hadn’t moved in.… And now … this postage-stamp image was all that remained. Dad had gone, Mum was absent due to being drunk, Damp was lost, and Titus …

  Pandora sighed. Titus, she decided, had lost himself in that blasted computer. When he wasn’t playing stupid games on it, he was thinking about playing stupid games on it. Pandora stood up. She pulled the last Disposawand from her pocket. A vague plan had begun to take shape in her mind. What if, she wondered with a wild grin flitting across her face, what if I shrink the computer? Then Titus won’t be able to play on it and he’ll have to do something about Dad and Mum and—Pandora’s face fell—and Damp. Bother. How do we get Tarantella and Damp back if the computer’s the size of a matchbox? Bother, bother.… Absently sucking the end of her wand, Pandora opened her bedroom door and sleepwalked out into the corridor, her mind full of a plan.

  There must be a way to do this, she reasoned as she walked slowly toward Titus’s room. There has to be a way … shrink the computer, but YES! That’s IT! Keep the modem and the CD-ROM the same size. YES, YES, YES, what a brain, Pandora, what a star, what a child prodigy. Pandora was so captivated by her own brilliance that she was through the door of Titus’s bedroom before she realized that he had a visitor. On reflection, she thought, not a visitor—an intruder.