Free Floods 5 by Colin Thompson Page B

as they had been lying on the floor at the time – it would make them the laughing stock of every forensic science laboratory around the world.
    â€˜Yes, that is one option,’ said the headmaster, ‘but I think there are too many people here who know that’s not the case. Sure, we’re wizards and I could just cast a Forget-You-Ever-Saw-A-Dead-Professor-Spell over the whole valley, but some of my more wealthy students have been injected with the Fabergé Seriously-Expensive-Anti-Spell-Serum, so the spell wouldn’t work on them – and, like lots of seriously wealthy children, they are nasty, snotty little troublemakers, just the sort to go selling a story to the papers. So I think we need to do Plan B.’
    â€˜Which is?’
    â€˜We will clone your dead professor.’
    â€˜Human cloning is a myth,’ said Grusom and Avid together.
    â€˜Not if you’re a wizard or a witch,’ said the headmaster. ‘It’s easy. Even our seven-year-olds can do it. Now I’m sure you’ve got some of those little plastic bags you people always seem to have containing little bits of nasty stuff you scraped off Professor Randolf Open-Graves. So you go off and fetch them while I send for Doctor Mordant, our genetic engineering and cloning teacher.’ 35
    Doctor Mordant was not at his best. As usual, he had been doing genetic engineering experiments on himself. He had finally settled on two as the best number of heads and legs, though he was still deciding what sort of feet he wanted. At the moment he had one human foot and one really huge elephant’s foot, which kept catching on the furniture and tripping him up. He was going to try mountain goat’s feet next as he had read that they were very agile at climbing up and down almostanything without falling off. On this particular day he had replaced all his fingers with cucumbers, which made it impossible for him to pick anything up, including his Genetic Engineering Instruction Book , which he needed to undo the spell.

    â€˜I just need a bit of help here,’ he said out of a third mouth somewhere inside his trousers. ‘Then I’ll be right with you.’
    Avid held up the book and turned the pages until he asked her to stop. He closed his eyes, muttered some silent secret words and his fingers and thumbs stopped being vegetables, though his ears appeared to have turned into two large ham sandwiches. More muttering and more secret words and his fingers changed from hairy goldfish back into normal fingers and his ears back into ears, though ones that would have looked better on a big rabbit.
    â€˜Phew, that’s better,’ he said from the mouth in his left face. ‘Now how can I help you?’
    The headmaster explained what had happened and Grusom handed Doctor Mordant a plastic bag containing some stuff he had retrieved from under the dead professor’s fingernails.
    â€˜OK, better stand back,’ said Doctor Mordant, tipping the tiny grey speck onto the table. ‘These things can be unpredictable. Do you know exactly what this sample is?’
    â€˜No,’ said Avid, reading the label on the sample bag. ‘We haven’t had time to complete ouranalysis. It came from beneath the professor’s right index finger.’
    Doctor Mordant peered through his magnifying glass, consulted his book, and peered some more.
    â€˜It doesn’t look very nice,’ he said. ‘If I wasn’t such an authority on cloning – I mean, if I was looking at this sample with an untrained eye – I would say it was a bit of snot.’
    â€˜But you are an expert,’ said the headmaster, ‘so what would you say it was?’
    Doctor Mordant looked again.
    â€˜Well, it could be a Big Brother contestant’s brain. They look very similar to a bit of snot or, as we cloning operatives like to call them, a bogey-wogey.’
    His first guess was right. The dead fake