Vile Visitors by Diana Wynne Jones Page B

back without wrecking the telly. Tony was so furious that he stormed off to fetch Dad, and Pip and I raced after him.
    Dad said, “I’ve had about enough of Angus!” which is strong language from him, and Mum said, “So have I!” and we all thundered back to the dining-room.
    And, would you believe this? Angus Flint was standing on his head, doing Yoga, watching Girls Galore upside-down! You can’t argue with someone who’s upside down. We tried, but it just can’t be done. Instead of a face, you have to talk to a pair of maroon socks – with a hole in one toe – nodding gently at eye-level. The face you ought to be arguing with is on the floor, squashed and purple-looking and the wrong way up. And when you’ve talked to the socks for a while, the squashed face on the floor says, “I have to stay like this for ten more minutes,” and you give up and go away. You have to.

    We went to bed. I don’t know how my parents managed for the rest of the evening, but I can guess. I heard them coming to bed. Dad was most earnestly probing to find out when Angus Flint intended to go. From the strong silence that followed, I gathered that Dad was getting the Stare Treatment too.
    In the middle of the night, we were all woken up by a dreadful smell of burning. We thought the house was on fire at first. We were quite pleased, because that’s one thing that’s never happened to us yet. But the smell turned out to come from the kitchen. It was thick and black, like when you burn toffee.
    So we all rushed into the kitchen. Angus Flint was there, calmly stuffing what looked like clean white sheets into the boiler.
    â€œI had to burn these,” he said. “They were covered with sugar or something.”
    â€œI could have washed them,” said Mum.
    She got the Stare. “They were ruined,” said Angus Flint.
    I looked at Pip. He was horribly disappointed. He has always had such faith in putting sugar in the beds of people he isn’t keen on, for a prank. It’s supposed to melt and make the victim sticky as well as scratchy. I’ve told him over and over again that it’s worth taking the time to catch fleas off Menace. But I suppose Angus Flint would have burnt the sheets for fleas too.

    He went to bed with clean sheets – Mum made his bed, because he never then, or any other time, did a thing for himself – saying he would sleep late next morning. In fact, he got up before I did and ate my breakfast. Dad fled then. He said he had an urgent experiment at the lab. The coward. He saw me coming. And I couldn’t complain to mum either, because Angus Flint took her over and told her all morning how his wife had left him.
    We heard quite a lot of it. The story had a sort of chorus which went, “Well, I couldn’t stand for that, and I had to pinch her.” The chorus came so many times that the poor woman must have been black and blue. No wonder she left him! If I were her, I would have— Well, perhaps not, because, as we were swiftly finding out, Angus Flint was quite immune to anything ordinary people could do.
    Mum was tired out by lunch time. “Get lunch, Candida,” she said. “I’m going out. I’ve got the – er – a meeting. I shan’t be in till nearly seven.”
    That was how our heartless and cowardly parents left Tony, Pip and me alone all and every day with Angus Flint.

f course we objected to being left alone with Angus Flint. Dad said that it was fair shares, because they had him all evening. My mother had the cheek to say to us, “Well, darlings, if you three can’t get rid of him, nobody can.”
    I raved at her. She didn’t know what it was like. He took Pip’s football away because he said we were making a noise with it. He took all the toy drums, all my new paper, and Tony’s trains. Tony has a way of leaving half-made models about, and Angus Flint used to take