Free Floods 6 by Colin Thompson Page B

sitting on their round boxes, the lion tamer stood in the middle of the ring and lifted his right arm above his head to give his whip a great crack to prove how macho he was. Just before the whip came down again, Mordonna clicked her fingers and the braided leather thongs turned into braided antelope’s intestines 43 dripping with blood and smelling very, very delicious. 44
    It was hard to tell who moved the quickest, the three lions or the lion tamer. It was all a blur as they fled down the tunnel. Actually, it was only the lion tamer who fled. The lions chased.

    What happened next:
    Actually, what happened next cannot be written down for the following reasons:
My publisher wouldn’t let me as this is a children’s book.
You can guess anyway.
Any really nasty, vicious stuff might not be too good for Mordonna’s image.
    But everyone lived happily ever after, sort of. The lions were taken to a lovely huge wildlife park, which was better than going back to the wild because they didn’t have to go and hunt for their dinner.
    They spent their afternoons lying in the shade of a big tree thinking, Life does not get any better than this.
    They also thought, I never realised that lion tamer could give you such indigestion.
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    The final act of the circus, which would have included the horses and poodles and lions, was a bit of an anti-climax.
    What normally happened was that pigeons were released and flew around the big top in a terrified flock, crashing into the ropes and polesbefore taking refuge on a perch right in the very top of the tent. Mordonna knew that there was only one way to get them down from there. After everyone had left, the circus owner would open the tap on a big cylinder of sleeping gas. The gas would drift up to the top of the tent and make all the pigeons pass out. One by one they would fall off the perch and fall down into the safety net, from where they would be stuffed back into their cages until the next performance. Needless to say, all that gas every day, and twice on Saturdays, made the poor birds feel horribly sick nearly all the time, so there was no way that Mordonna was going to let that happen ever again.
    When Mordonna made a hole appear in the canvas, the pigeons couldn’t believe their luck and flew off to join the horses in the forest. 45

    â€˜Great show,’ said Betty as they walked back to the hotel.
    â€˜Yeah, cool,’ said Ffiona.
    â€˜Certainly not what I expected,’ said Mrs Hulbert.

Although Valla loved his family, he was by nature a solitary being. He imagined that one day he would meet the right girl and fall in love and get married. He realised that as the eldest of the Flood children it was his responsibility to carry on the great name of Flood, but for the moment he was happiest with his own company and the company of mysterious creatures of the night, who were dark and exciting to be with, but not the sort of beings you would marry or even take home to meet Mum and Dad.
    So a holiday, to Valla, meant going out afterdark and wandering the lanes and alleyways and graveyards of the town. While most of Port Folio was asleep, he made new and exciting friends, many of whom lived under stones or in the dark recesses of family vaults. The undead, the freshly dead and the we-want-to-be-dead-but-cannot-die-because-of-an-evil-curse were the creatures Valla felt at home with. Most of them had long since lost their blood, which meant that Valla was never tempted to sink his teeth into their necks. It never ceased to amaze him that a lot of people didn’t actually enjoy it when he did that.
    Although it was a very small town, Port Folio had two undertakers. This was because it was the sort of place lots of old people went to live when they retired, and old people have a tendency to die more than young people, so there was always enough work to keep both undertakers busy. In fact, sometimes there was too much work and the richer families sent their