Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York
Text and illustrations copyright © 2001 by Debi Gliori
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eISBN: 978-0-375-89025-3
Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers
v3.1
For My Family and Other Beasts
With grateful thanks to the Scottish Arts Council
for keeping the wolf from the door
and to the beautiful west coast of Scotland
for providing the inspiration
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Dramatis Personae
Great Scottish Houses
The Ideal Candidate
Latch Undone
Hiring Flora
A Little Bit of Damp
Where on Earth?
E-rats
The Wager
Beasts in the Basement
Arachnids in the Attic
At Home with the di S’Embowelli Borgias
Nil by Mouth
The Night Outside …
… And the Night Within
Magic for Beginners
A Little Family History
E-rats Redux
Damp on the Web
Pronto Gets Help
A Wee Hot Toddy
Arachnids with Attitude
A Warm Welcome
The Hot Toddy Revisited
Tarantella Does the Biz
A Gory Bit
Chilled Attila
Something Wicked This Way Comes
A Pound of Flesh
You’re Toast
The Music of the Pipes
The Revenge of the Hot Toddy
A Muffin-Scented Gale
Endgame
A Bit of a Mix-up
A Simple Twist of Fate
Sorted
The Taste of Summer
Swimming with the Crocodile
Dramatis Personae
THE FAMILY
TITUS STREGA-BORGIA—twelve-year-old hero
PANDORA STREGA-BORGIA—ten-year-old heroine
DAMP STREGA-BORGIA—their fourteen-month-old sister
SIGNOR LUCIANO AND SIGNORA BACI STREGA-BORGIA—parents of the above
STREGA-NONNA—great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother (cryogenically preserved) of Titus, Pandora, and Damp
THE GOOD HELP THAT WAS HARD TO FIND
MRS. FLORA MCLACHLAN—nanny to Titus, Pandora, and Damp
LATCH—butler
MARIE BAIN—cook
THE BEASTS
MULTITUDINA—rat, mother to multitudes, and Pandora’s pet
TARANTELLA—spider with attitude
SAB, FFUP, AND KNOT—mythical Schloss dungeon beasts
TOCK—crocodile inhabitant of Schloss moat
THE GANGSTERS
DON LUCIFER DI S…EMBOWELLI BORGIA—half brother of Luciano Strega-Borgia
DON CHIMERA DI CARNE BORGIA—grandfather (deceased) of Titus, Pandora, and Damp
PRONTO—Don Lucifer’s consigliere (adviser)
All resemblance to persons living or dead is unintentional, but the author wishes to acknowledge a definite similarity between herself and Tarantella.
from
GREAT SCOTTISH HOUSES YOU CAN’T AFFORD
(June 1987)
StregaSchloss, Argyll and Bute
This property, three miles from the little Highland town of Auchenlochtermuchty (pop. 786), commands one of the finest views of the Kyles of Mhoire Ochone. Set in 500 acres of ancient forest and flanked by the wild beauty of the Bengormless mountain range, the house itself is an architectural gem.
Built c. 1400 on the Austrian model, it boasts several turrets, a moat (the drawbridge was used as firewood during the oil crisis of 1732), and a particularly fine example of a dungeon, seldom seen in properties of this kind.
It has been owned by the clan Strega-Borgia since 1645, when it was acquired in lieu of rent by Malvolio di S’Enchantedino Borgia from Campbell Caravanserus of Lochnagargoyle. Its charming and unusual name refers to the family’s Italian heritage and the house’s Germanic style of architecture.
(Rumor has it that the ghost of Malvolio’s grandmother can still be seen in the wine cellar.)
The Ideal Candidate
From an upstairs window peered three pairs of eyes. The six eyes watched as a plump woman negotiated the moat, apparently unaware of the murderous Tock who dozed in its depths.
“That’s the third one this week,” observed a voice.
“Fourth, if you count the one that Tock ate for breakfast,” said a second voice.
The third pair of eyes blinked. Too young to speak, their owner wondered if this one could change diapers and sing the right kind of lullaby to hush a witch baby to sleep.
Having spotted the sleeping crocodile as she crossed the moat, Mrs. McLachlan climbed the steps, sat heavily on a stone griffin guarding the front door, and gazed around. She rooted in a battered handbag and produced a crumpled newspaper advertisement and a pair of reading glasses. Wedging the glasses on the end of her nose, she re-read:
Energetic nanny/mother’s helper urgently required for Titus (12), Pandora (10), and Damp (14 months). The ideal candidate will enjoy a spot of light housework, be well versed in plumbing and veterinary science, have some understanding of cryogenics, and know instinctively how to make french fries that are crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle. Hours and salary negotiable.
“Take deep breaths, Flora,” Mrs. McLachlan commanded herself. “Relax. This is a perfectly ordinary job requiring no magical skills whatsoever. Think nanny. Think diapers. Think nursery teas, fluffy bunnies, and lullabies …” She refolded the advertisement and tucked it back into her bag. “You want to forget the past?” she continued. “Here is your chance to put it behind you. From the moment you step through this door, you will forget that you were ever a witch.”
Above her head, the lintel was decorated with several cherubs peering through an infestation of stone bats. The ugliest of these cherubs had one eye that was not carved in stone but rendered in black plastic, and this slid open, rotated slowly, and finally fixed its lens on the woman below.
Upstairs in the observatory, Titus and Pandora examined the new nanny on the closed-circuit television screen. Damp crawled across the dusty floor, occasionally finding dead daddy longlegs and popping them into her mouth.
“Let me see,” said Titus.
“I’m looking in her handbag just now, hang on, I’ll move the field a bit.”
“Let me see,” said Titus.
“You’re supposed to be watching Damp. I did for ages in the attic, it’s your turn.… Oh gross!”
“What?”
“She’s got hairy legs.…”
“Could you stop giving me the picture in snack-sized bites? LET ME SEE.”
“She’s nervous, Titus, see for yourself. Well, that’s understandable.”
Pandora stood up and surrendered her seat to her brother. Titus pressed keys and rolled the mouse with the ease of an expert. The screen in fron
t of him filled with a close-up of the wannabe nanny’s face.
“She’s so old,” he moaned.
“Not as old as that wrinkly on Monday. Remember? The one that called me Panettone and left lipstick kisses all over Damp?”
“Well, she was better than that scary one who went on about the importance of diet for raising children and said that if she got the job she’d make sure we ate Brussels sprouts and cabbage every other day.”
“Nightmare Nanny,” said Pandora.
“What does that make old furry-legs downstairs?” said Titus, allowing the screen saver to appear. A lurid pattern of purple bats flittering across a computer-generated landscape replaced the view of the ideal candidate downstairs.
“Come on, stinkpod,” he said, picking up his baby sister and opening the door for Pandora.
“She hasn’t, has she?” Pandora glared at Damp.
“Oh yes, you have, haven’t you, horrible? Phwoarrr …” Titus held Damp at arm’s length. “Let’s go and meet Nanny, shall we?”
“Shall we dress up?” said Pandora. “Flour in the hair? Lipstick blood? Fangs?”
“I suppose so,” said Titus, with little enthusiasm. “Rats too?”
“Perfect,” Pandora called over her shoulder as she ran downstairs holding her nose. “Although Damp’s derriere ought to be quite enough to put any nanny off.”
Titus followed downstairs, breathing through his mouth. He opened the kitchen door and sighed. Interviewing prospective nannies had been fun at first—introducing them to the pregnant rat Multitudina, meeting Strega-Nonna in her deep freeze, Tock the croc, and all the other scream-inducing creatures that were part of life at StregaSchloss—but after one had watched the nannies turn pale and begin to twitch twenty times or more, the novelty and the glee began to pall. Frankly, it was boring. Nannies were boring. Frightening them was boring. And listening to them try to ingratiate themselves with the family was MEGAboring.
Titus watched as Pandora sprinkled flour in her hair in preparation for greeting the new nanny.
“Do we have to meet her?” Titus said, opening the fridge and gazing at the woeful lack of contents within.
“If we don’t,” Pandora said in the voice used for explaining large ideas to small people with even smaller IQs, “Mum might go ahead and hire her, and then we’d end up with someone as horrible as that one who said, ‘Much as it pains me to admit, children occasionally need to be spanked soundly for their own good.’ ”
Pandora hauled Damp out of the compost bucket, scattered a handful of flour over the baby’s head, and smiled at her brother. “Only Tock could answer that,” she said.
Upstairs the doorbell rang.
Latch Undone
With a sound that set his teeth on edge, Latch undid bolts, opened padlocks, and turned a vast key in a rusty lock. “You rang?” he said, stating the obvious.
Latch believed in wearing the classic butler’s costume of white shirt, black tie, and black jacket. Admiring his reflection in the hall mirror for the seventeenth time that morning, he thought how the overall effect was ruined by the sight of his own hairy knees peeking shyly from beneath a kilt of uncertain provenance.
He scratched furiously, for his butler’s kilt had been pressed into service as a dog blanket before it became the uniform of a servant. In all other respects, his job as Schloss butler was perfect, for it gave him a large salary, use of a small car, three rooms in the Schloss attic, and all in return for a pleasant manner with a door, being able to iron newspapers, balance the morning mail on a silver tray—and wear this unspeakable woolly skirt.
Scowling horribly, Latch opened the door. On the doorstep stood a woman. She was middle-aged, plump, carried a large handbag of battered plastic, and smelled of lavender.
“Good morning,” she said, dragging her gaze upward from Latch’s knees to meet his eyes. “I have an appointment with Mrs. Borgia.”
Latch stared with a momentary lapse of manners. The woman’s rolling R’s sounded like the deep purr of a fireside cat and the lilt in her voice spoke of midges, peat bogs, sheep’s wool ensnared in barbed wire, and the underfoot resilience of heather. Latch was briefly transported back in time to his youth and then instantly hurled back into the present.
“Are you going to keep gawking at me like a sheep or are you going to let me in, laddie?”
Latch cleared his throat, shuddered slightly, and said, “If modom would be good enough to furnish me with her name?”
“Heavens, laddie, what a pompous little person you are. My name’s Flora Morag Fionn Mhairi ben McLachlan-Morangie-Fiddach. Mrs. McLachlan to youse. Now will you let me in?” And pushing past Latch, Mrs. McLachlan strode into the great hall of StregaSchloss.
The morning sun highlighted the fact that the house had been sadly neglected. Cobwebs drooped across the ceiling, the crystal chandelier didn’t twinkle, and crumpled envelopes filled the empty marble fireplace. Breathing in the combined perfumes of beeswax and old dog with an undertone of log fire and full diaper, Mrs. McLachlan came to a halt at a large hall table, which was strewn with bills, letters, glossy catalogs, an assortment of leashes, ropes, and chains, and some exceedingly large dog collars.
Latch closed the front door, marched past Mrs. McLachlan, and threw open a door into the darkest and most depressing room in StregaSchloss. “The discouraging room, modom. If you’ll just take a seat, I’ll inform Signora Strega-Borgia of your arrival.”
Latch bowed Mrs. McLachlan into the cramped waiting room and closed the door on her. “A McLachlan-Morangie-Fiddach!” he muttered. She’d probably brought her own kilt.
As the butler’s footsteps receded down the corridor, Mrs. McLachlan peered at the only seat in the discouraging room. This was a sofa that looked about as unwelcoming as it was possible to be without barbed wire, large signs saying KEEP OFF, and packs of patrolling Dobermans. Mrs. McLachlan waited. A clock somewhere distant chimed the hour. Far away, a phone rang several times and stopped.
Mrs. McLachlan prodded a sofa cushion and sighed. Despite her recent promise to herself, this was one of those times where just one little magical tweak would make life so much easier. With a furtive glance around herself to make absolutely sure that no one could see what she was about to do, she opened her handbag. From deep inside it, she removed a small plastic case. She undid a hidden clip and a tiny screen popped up, revealing a keyboard underneath. Hastily looking over her shoulder, she pinned her tongue between her teeth to aid concentration and typed in S.P.R.I.N.G.S., pressed a key named TRASH, re-typed G.O.O.S.E.F.E.A.T.H.E.R., then pressed a key named REPLACE. She pointed the whole thing at the sofa and undid her tongue from her teeth.
There was a noise like that of someone being punched in the stomach with a vast marshmallow. A sort of whufffff. The sofa instantly looked like it had only just limped through three rounds with a heavyweight boxing champion. The sofa slumped, it bulged, it oozed saggily. Had it not been a sofa, it might have coughed and spat out a few broken teeth. Now it looked as if you could sit on it without it putting up a fight.
Mrs. McLachlan smiled. She replaced her case in her handbag and sat heavily on the sofa. The sofa surrendered. A clock somewhere chimed quarter past the hour.
Hiring Flora
“Hold still,” commanded Titus.
“I’m trying to,” said Pandora, “but Damp wants to hold the lipstick.… No! Damp! Spit it out! Look at her, Titus, she looks like she fell from a great height and used her lips as a brake. Oh, Damp, don’t dribble.…”
“What a disgusting baby,” said Titus lovingly. “I think she’s perfect for a bit of nanny-baiting, aren’t you, Damp?” He stood back to admire the effect.
Damp’s bottom lip quivered ominously.
“And now she’s crying … told you she’d be perfect,” Titus said, turning to grin at his mirrored reflection.
Pandora shifted
Damp onto her other hip and gave the baby a half-eaten cookie. Stopped in mid-wail by the appearance of food, Damp gazed up at her big sister, then risked a look at Titus.
“You look hideous,” Pandora said approvingly.
Titus smirked, then hastily readjusted a set of glow-in-the-dark fangs, patted his slicked-down hair and pulled the collar of his cloak tight around his throat. “This ought to do the trick,” he said.
“Exit one nanny,” Pandora agreed. “Hold Small-and-Smelly till I sort out my veil.” She passed the baby over and began to drape her head and shoulders in tattered muslin. Damp made a grab for Titus’s fangs.
“Move over, would you?” Pandora nudged her brother. “Stop hogging the mirror.”
The three children gazed at their joint reflections. From the mirror, three small vampires gazed back.
“Ready?” Titus wrapped Damp securely in his cloak and opened the kitchen door.
“Got you!” Pandora plucked something off the kitchen table and instantly stuffed it down the front of her dress.
“Is that what I think it is?” groaned Titus. “Oh, Pandora, you’re so gross.”
“Yup,” said Pandora, gliding out of the kitchen in a swirl of muslin. “Let’s hope the new nanny thinks so too.”
Latch stood statue-still inside the door of the discouraging room, watching in disgust as his employer, Signora Strega-Borgia, fell under the spell of Mrs. McLachlan (“Call me Flora, dear”).
Signora Strega-Borgia was enchanted. At long last, here was a normal person. A person whose day would be full of nursery teas, changing diapers, singing lullabies, and reading stories about happy families of fluffy bunnies. Stories in which Mother Rabbit wasn’t a struggling student witch, and Father Rabbit hadn’t hopped out of the burrow vowing never to return.…
Three weeks ago, her husband, Signor Strega-Borgia, had stormed out of their family home in a temper and since then StregaSchloss had been shrouded in a veil of gloom. Despite the fact that their school was shut for the summer, the children rapidly turned mutinous, the staff grew surly, and everyone spoke only in monosyllabic grunts. Dust and cobwebs began to accumulate, giving the whole Schloss an air of neglect. It was as if a fog had descended on the house—everything was colored in shades of gray, and every day was a Monday.