Free Floods 8 by Colin Thompson

‘Get me a pen and some paper. We’ll make a Grand Plan now.’
    It turned out that there was only one part to the Grand Plan and it was: Get Rid Of The King And His Gross New Wife.
    â€˜I assume,’ said Mordonna to Betty, ‘that you can reverse the spell you put on the Countess?’
    â€˜Reverse?’
    â€˜Yes, so we can get her out of the doorway.’
    â€˜Not exactly,’ said Betty.
    â€˜Meaning?’
    â€˜Meaning that I haven’t actually thought about it,’ said Betty.
    â€˜Well, maybe you could start thinking about it now, young lady. Spells have consequences, you know.’
    â€˜OK.’
    Betty did some thinking, then a bit more thinking, and then said, ‘OK, I’ve finished thinking.’
    â€˜And?’
    â€˜No, I haven’t the faintest idea how to reverse it,’ Betty explained. ‘It all happened so quickly that I can’t remember what I did to trap her in the first place. I can remember clicking my fingers and there was a sort of flash of light, but after that my mind’s a blank.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    Queen Scratchrot and Auntie Mould thought that was hilarious and came up with all sorts of silly suggestions of what could be done to get the Countess free. Their favourite was cutting her up with a chainsaw and, just for a laugh, putting the bits back together back to front so her bottom ended up just below her face.
    â€˜Or we could set her on fire,’ said Queen Scratchrot. ‘I bet all that fat would burn really well.’
    â€˜Stop it, stop it,’ Auntie Mould cried. ‘If I laugh any more I’ll wet myself. Oops.’

    The obvious solution – apart from the really, really obvious solution of getting Nerlin or Mordonna to do some magic, which no one had thought of – was to remove the entire wall with the Countess stuck in the doorway, and this what they decided to do. And because she was weighed down with fifty tons of stone there would be the added bonus of the Countess not being able to move fast enough, or at all even, to chase and hurt anyone.
    â€˜And if she does fall on anyone,’ said the Queen, ‘it’ll just feel the same whether she’s stuck in a huge lump of rock or not.’
    â€˜Stop it, stop it,’ Auntie Mould cried, tears of laughter pouring down her face. ‘Oops.’
    First they had to catch the King – but that would be easy. Every single day of his life at two o’clock in the afternoon he went to the toilet whether he needed to or not. That was not why he went. He went to read his secret magazines that he kept hidden under a loose floorboard. These were not rude magazines, but every single edition of What Cardigan magazine, which he had secretlysmuggled in from outside, because King Quatorze was a cardigan addict, so much so that sometimes he wore three at once, though he always kept them hidden beneath his royal regalia. Even the teddy bear he took to bed each night had a little wardrobe of cardigans.
    So the next day, as the King sat on the lavatory enjoying the August 1967 edition of What Cardigan with its exciting feature on Famous Belgian Cardigans of History, Queen Scratchrot performed the legendary Flying Toilet Spell. Not just the toilet but the entire room rose silently into the air and headed west over Europe and out towards the Atlantic Ocean.
    At the same time, Auntie Mould performed the Flying Wall Spell and the kitchen wall containing Countess Slab rose up through the ceiling, out over the town, across Lake Tarnish, up over the mountain tops and followed the King out into the Atlantic. They flew unseen over Scotland, past the islands of the Hebrides and even past the remoteness of St Kilda.
    And then they began to descend towards a tiny desolate rock sticking out of the angry sea.
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    Rockall. 39

    All the while the terrified Countess had been screaming at the top of her voice, but the King was so deeply immersed in the beauty of