grew to an enormously large size. Harry gave him another icy cold stare, even colder stare than the first. “Sorry, again,” Larry giggled, “I don’t get many visitors these days, and when I do I tend to get a bit carried away.” Having said that, he tried his best to calm down, and although he twitched nervously from time to time he remained relatively silent.
Miocene continued with her tragically comic tale…
“Larry,” she began.
“That’s me,” said the ghost, butting in again.
Ignoring him, she continued, “Larry was – distracted…”
“Distracted? Distracted by what?” Box asked.
“By an all pervading power of – evil,” she replied. “A power so strong he – Larry – was helpless against it.”
“What was it?”
“He, it was a he,” Miocene whispered, barely audible.
“He, he – who?” asked Box, terribly confused by what he was hearing.
“Holdavort. It was a man...called Holdavort.”
Box, who was by now so puzzled, simply stood there saying nothing, allowing Miocene to continue with her story.
“This man, this Holdavort, whom no one had any idea where he had come from – was evil personified,” she whispered. “He was so evil all the devils, tangible and intangible, had given him a wide berth, so wide he barely knew of their existence, preferring their own kind, to the terrible evil this man engrossed. The devils had vacated our land with a vengeance.
“Where did they all go?” asked Box, his heart pounding with both excitement and fear.
“To Muddleland, of course,” she replied.
“To Muddleland? Oh, you mean Earth – are you sure?”
“Yes, and they’re still there to this very day. That’s why you Muddles, no insult intended, Box, have such a fear of the dark…”
“The devils?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Devils must keep to the Darkness; it’s paramount to suicide if they were to enter the light.”
“It’s all getting frightfully heavy,” said Box, wiping his sweating brow.
“That’s why poor Larry,” she pointed to the ghost, he smiled back nervously at her, “lost it – the plot – and why he’s still here to this very day.”
“You mean the devils put him here, in this toilet?”
“NO, NO!” she said, getting annoyed at his difficulty in grasping the facts. “It was Holdavort who did it!”
“Oh…”
“Whereas the devils vacated this land, to escape this greater evil, Larry tried to fight it, and that, my dear Muddle friend, was his downfall.”
“So Holdavort killed him?”
“He killed him all right,” Miocene continued, “but not content with having done that, Holdavort seized his soul, his spirit, before it could return to The Summerland…banishing it for all time to this, this toilet room, as his way of reminding everyone never to cross him.
“What’s Summerland?” Box asked, increasingly embarrassed by his ignorance on matters important, and the questions he felt impelled to ask.
“It’s Heaven, by your way of reckoning,” she said, “but, to us, it’s so much more than simply that.”
“Tell me, again, why Larry is so crazy,” said Box, scratching his head, still in some confusion.
“Escapism, it was a diversion, the only way that he could deal with his terrible never ending punishment.”
Larry smiled at Box and began fidgeting about with his fingers, again.
“Hold on,” said Box. “If all this is true, then what happened to this Holdavort person?”
“If only he had been just that – a person,” said Miocene, looking increasingly worried. “He was so more than a person… And although he’s been gone for some time, we all know, deep down inside, that one day he will return, and we fear it, we so fear it.”
Still confused, Box scratched his head for the umpteenth time, and asked, “If Holdavort was all-powerful how was he defeated?” Miocene nodded in Harry’s direction.
“Go away!” said Box, in sheer disbelief, “No! I don’t believe it. No, she could never have done that. No! No! No!”
Although Harry felt that she was above something so Muddling as vanity, she found it increasingly hard to resist giving Box a piece of her mind – and a fistful of education. But she resisted it, for she was a hero, and the Muddle, her cousin, now knew it.
Having accepted (although with some difficulty, at first) that Harry, his troublesome cousin was actually a hero, Box was absolutely bursting with curiosity as to how this could have come about, how she had managed to defeat this all-powerful Holdavort character – and apparently so easily. “Tell me, Harry,” he said, “When did this take place, you know, when you thrashed this person – thingy?”
Replying, Harry made it perfectly clear, and in no uncertain terms, that she had not thrashed Holdavort. “Don’t make light of it,” she warned. “I was almost killed in that encounter…”
“Sorry,” he apologised, “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“It’s okay,” she replied, “I’m beginning to get used to your Muddling ways, but try and think before blurting out such silly things in the future, will you?”
“I’ll try,” he promised, feeling quite small.
“Having said that,” Harry continued, “I will tell you what happened…”
“Thanks, I’m all ears,” Box replied.
“Ears? Did someone say something about ears?” said Laughing Larry, his ears beginning to grow in size once again.
“Not now!” Miocene scolded, “Harry is speaking.”
“Sorry,” said Larry, his ears quickly returning to their original dimensions.
“Now where was I?” said Harry.
“You were just about to begin,” Box told her, choosing his words more carefully, this time.
“Hmm, yes, okay. Here goes then,” she said. “It happened during my first year of schooling, here at Hagswords. And although I had been here since I was a baby, when I had been abandoned on the steps, I was still as green behind the ears as the rest of the ‘first-yearers’. And although I had been well cared for, I held no affection, no closeness, and certainly no respect for those in control of the school. Having no desire to be here, in the first place, I thought it best to keep to myself and do my own thing as I had always done.”
Seeing where the conversation was leading, Larry giggled, “I remember it – I really do!”
Sending him another one of her icy cold stares, Harry stopped the mad ghost dead in his tracks. “As I was saying,” she continued, “I did my own thing, which, unfortunately, led me into this very convenience one dark and dreary Sunday afternoon …”
“I knew it, I knew it,” the ghost giggled.
Harry ignored him, and continuing on with her story, she said, “Having nothing better to do, I had been exploring... Anywhere – everywhere that they had told me was out of bounds, was in bounds as far as I was concerned…”
“Yes, yes,” Larry giggled, in his growing excitement.
“That’s why I came in here,” she explained. “No coot, no matter how old, was going to tell me where to go. So I opened the door and simply walked in!”
“What did you find?” Box asked. He was now feeling almost as excited as the crazy mad ghost.
“At first, nothing,” Harry replied. “But after some rather boring minutes, just staring at this grimy interior, old Larry showed up – and we got on splendidly together.”
Clapping his hands, Larry began flying, swooping around the toilet unable to contain his excitement.
“Weren’t you afraid to be in here on your own – with a ghost?”
“Why?” she asked. “What harm can a ghost do?”
“I dunno,” Box mumbled. “What happened then?”
Her mood changing markedly, Harry whispered, “Then, he showed up…”
“He? He – who? ”
“Holdavort, of course,” she snapped. Who do you think – Father Christma
s?”
“I was only asking!”
“Sorry,” she apologised. “It’s still rather a sore topic.” Having said that, Harry became silent, saying no more – not even one word.
Box wondered was that all that she was going to say, but having no intention of pressing her any further than she was comfortable with, he began walking around the room, inspecting its dust-laden furnishings, until Harry felt like telling him some more.
Running a finger along the top of one of the wash hand basins, Box realised just how dusty the place really was. He turned on one of the taps. It screeched reluctantly into life. He waited for the water to flow, but it didn’t; the only thing that came out from it was a cloud of fine dust. Coughing, leaving the fixtures and fitting well enough alone, Box returned to his cousin.
Are you quite finished?” she asked, her hands on her hips, showing her annoyance with him for having walked off.
“God, you scared me!” he replied. “I thought we were having a break,” he lied, having no better excuse to offer.
Returning to her story, Harry said, “Like I have already said, Holdavort showed up… And in my ignorance I had absolutely no idea who he was. He could have been Jack the Ripper – or the Pope for all that I knew.”
“What happened?”
“Now this is the strange bit,” she said, in a whisper. “He made a beeline for the ghost, Larry, as if I was not even there.”
Larry remained silent, his recent spate of good humour having deserted him.
Harry continued, “And when he reached Larry, he began attacking him with a vengeance. It really spooked me, Box, for I had no idea how he was able to do it, you know, to touch a ghost. I began shouting, I said, ‘Leave him alone, you big bully.’ That’s when