Free Floods 5 by Colin Thompson

said Merlinmary.
    â€˜But it’s still raining and we’re still sitting in the middle of a road in London?’ said Winchflat.
    â€˜I think so, except there are horses now and everyone’s wearing really old-fashioned clothes,’ said Merlinmary. ‘Still, there’s good news too.’
    â€˜What?’ said Winchflat, twisting knobs and pushing buttons.
    â€˜It’s just stopped raining.’
    Winchflat finally realised what he’d been doing wrong.
    â€˜I was using the co-ordinates I’d use if we were at home, not at school. I’ll have to re-calculate,’ he said.
    â€˜Well, you’d better hurry up,’ said Merlinmary, pulling the door shut. ‘There are three evil-looking villains approaching and I think they’re highwaymen.’
    â€˜You know, the nineteenth century would be a great place to hide,’ said Morbid as a loud pounding began on the outside of the wardrobe.
    Merlinmary clicked her fingers and there were three piercing screams, followed by silence. Whenshe opened the door again, there were three very well-toasted robbers lying on the ground.
    â€˜Ooh, toasties,’ said Satanella, sniffing the air. ‘I like toasties.’
    â€˜That’s odd,’ said Winchflat. ‘The Zoomy thing’s not designed to travel through time. That’s the last time I buy a calculator made in Belgium.’
    Winchflat finished his calculations, pressed the buttons, and they landed on Lord Clacton’s doormat in the deserted desert village of Kalibarquorumire.
    Lord Clacton was the image of an absent-minded professor. His buttons were in the wrong holes, he was wearing odd socks – on his hands – and he had an omelette in his shirt pocket. Like all true geniuses, he lived in another world, a magic place where normal people only go when they have a very high fever. The upside of this was that the sudden appearance of five strange-looking young wizards in a wardrobe on his doorstep didn’t upset or frighten him at all.

    â€˜Yes, absolutely, of course, quite so,’ he said. ‘Winchflat Flood, I presume.’
    â€˜Lord Clacton,’ said Winchflat, and the two of them exchanged a strange handshake that was nothing like the secret Freemason’s handshake, but exactly like the Secret-Planetary-Network-of-Genius-Nerds-Special-Handshake, only more mysterious.
    â€˜Come, we have much to do,’ said Lord Clacton. ‘The time machine is at an exciting stage of development. I take it that’s why you are here.’
    â€˜Well, dear friend,’ said Winchflat, sounding more like a forty-five-year-old scientist than a fifteen-year-old wizard. ‘That’s not why we came. Much as I would like nothing more than to get your invention working, we came here to hide. We need to lie low for a while.’
    Lord Clacton, like most absent-minded boffins, took every word at its literal meaning. He lived in a little world of his own that few people, apart from Winchflat, could imagine, never mind visit. That, combined with his very formal well-mannered upbringing at Castle Clacton in England, meant that he was far too polite to askthe Floods what they were hiding from. 33
    â€˜Well, you’re in luck,’ Lord Clacton said. ‘I believe this is the only house in the whole of the Sahara with a cellar, so if you all go down there and stretch out on the floor you will be lying lower than anyone else for thousands of miles.’
    Winchflat didn’t even try to begin to explain so, after a meal of cucumber sandwiches, scones and tea brought by a very, very old butler, the five Flood children went and lay down on the cellar floor.
    â€˜Do you think his lordship would mind if I ate those spiders?’ said Merlinmary, pointing up at the ceiling.
    â€˜You can never tell with Clacton,’ said Winchflat. ‘They could be part of some experiment, or not even spiders at all.’
    â€˜So, is this time