Read Online Floods 5 by Colin Thompson - Free Book Online Page B

themselves with FesterClear air freshener, which Winchflat always carried in one of his many Very Useful Pockets, and discussed the best place to go and hide.
    â€˜How about Patagonia?’ said Merlinmary. ‘I’ve always wanted to go there.’
    â€˜Umm, yes, brilliant,’ said Satanella. ‘Except we’re actually in Patagonia right now.’
    â€˜Oh. It’s not at all how I imagined it would be from the David Attenborough programmes.’
    â€˜The last place the Hearse Whisperer would look would be Tristan da Cunha,’ said Morbid. ‘If we wait until she leaves, we could go and hide on the island where she’s burying the dead body.’
    â€˜That,’ said Winchflat, ‘is a brilliant idea. The trouble is that because it is so brilliant and the last place she would look, it’s probably the first place she would check.’
    â€˜No, no,’ said Silent inside Winchflat’s head, ‘the last place she would look would be Transylvania Waters.’
    â€˜That’s way too risky,’ said Winchflat. ‘Even though no one from there has ever seen us so they wouldn’t know who we were.’
    â€˜We could stay here,’ said Merlinmary.
    â€˜Second place she’ll look and first place those FSI people will look,’ said Winchflat. ‘No, I have an idea. We’ll go and visit my internet friend, Lord Clacton.’
    â€˜Who?’ said Merlinmary, Satanella and the twins.
    â€˜Lord Clacton. He’s my best friend and, for a human, quite intelligent,’ Winchflat explained. ‘He’s often helped me with some of my inventions and I’m helping him build a time machine. It’ll be the perfect place to go. I’ve never met him, not in person, and he lives in a deserted desert village fifty-three miles from the nearest town, which is miles from anywhere.’
    â€˜Where’s that?’ said Satanella.
    â€˜Timbuktu.’
    â€˜Isn’t that a type of parrot?’ said Merlinmary.
    Once they had established that Timbuktu was a city in North Africa and not a type of parrot, they had to decide how to get from the remote Patagonian valley near the bottom of South America to the remote Saharan town in North Africa. They could:
Walk: Mostly this would mean walking under water or on top of the water. All witches can of course do both, but it wasa very long way and Satanella in particular had very short legs.
Fly: The obvious choice, which meant it was the most risky. Not only would the Hearse Whisperer be scanning the air, but so would the FSI people.
Use a Star Trek Transporter: Difficult because there is no such thing.
Post: Send themselves in a big parcel.
Use Winchflat’s Shrink-You-As-Small-As-A-Speck-Of-Dust-Transport-You-Somewhere-Then-Enlarge-You-Again-Machine– aka the Zoomy Thing. 32
    Although Winchflat’s Zoomy Thing was the size of a wardrobe and normally lived in his bedroom at home in Acacia Avenue, by an incredible strokeof good luck, the last time he’d left home he had shrunk it down small enough to fit into yet another of his Very Useful Pockets and brought it to school with him.
    He had never done this before.
    â€˜I don’t know why I brought it,’ he said as he restored it to its full size. ‘Just some strange premonition – a sort of Oprah moment, I suppose.’
    They all squeezed inside, Winchflat fiddled with the controls and they vanished.

‘Are you sure this is the Sahara?’ said Merlinmary, opening the wardrobe door a crack and peering out. ‘It’s raining extremely hard and if you don’t do something in the next 3.1 seconds a very big red double-decker London bus is going to hit us in about 3.2 seconds.’
    Winchflat did something and muttered about stupid dyslexic keyboards.
    â€˜Is that better?’ he said when they stopped being a mass of molecules whizzing through space and time.
    â€˜Well, the bus has gone,’