‘But—’
‘Cleaning her foul yellow teeth in my wash basin,’ raged Arriman, getting more and more hysterical. ‘Or worse still, not cleaning her foul yellow teeth in my wash basin.’
‘She could have her own bathroom,’ said the Middle Head sensibly.
But nothing could stop Arriman who stormed and ranted for another ten minutes. Then, turning suddenly very calm and pale, he said, ‘Very well, I see that it is my duty.’
‘A wise decision, sir,’ said his secretary.
‘How shall I choose?’ said Arriman. His voice was a mere thread. ‘It’ll have to be a Todcaster witch, I suppose. Otherwise there’s bound to be bad feeling. But how do we decide which witch?’
‘As to that, sir,’ said Mr Leadbetter, ‘I have an idea.’
Two
The witches of Todcaster were preparing for a coven and they were very much excited. Covens are to witches what the Wolf Cubs or the Brownies are to people: a way of getting together and doing the things that interest them. And this one wasn’t to be just an ordinary coven with feasting and dancing and wickedness. Rumours were going round that a most important announcement would be made.
‘I wonder what it’ll be,’ said Mabel Wrack. ‘Some new members, perhaps. We could do with them.’
This was very true. Todcaster now only had seven proper witches. If Arriman had known what a state witchcraft had got to in the town of his birth he’d have been even more miserable than he was, but fortunately he didn’t.
By day, Miss Wrack kept a wet fish shop not far from Todcaster Pier. She was a sea witch and never liked to be too far from the water. Miss Wrack’s mother, Mrs Wrack, had been a mermaid: a proper one who lived on a rock and combed her hair and sang. But sailors had never been lured to their doom by her, partly because she looked like the back of a bus and partly because modern ships are so high out of the water that they never even saw her. So one day she had simply waddled out on to the beach at Todcaster Head with some sovereigns from a sunken galleon and persuaded a plastic surgeon who was on holiday there to operate on her tail and turn it into two legs.
It was from her mother that Mabel Wrack had her magic powers. From her father, Mr Wrack, she had the shop.
To day she closed the shutters early, put a couple of cods’ heads into a paper bag and set off for her seaside bungalow. She was just turning into her road when she saw a group of children paddling happily in the surf.
‘Tut!’ said Miss Wrack, pursing her lips. She closed her eyes, waved her paper bag with the cods’ heads and said some poetry. Almost at once a shoal of stinging jellyfish appeared in the water and the children ran screaming to their mothers.
‘That’s better,’ said Miss Wrack. Like most witches, she hated happiness.
When she got home she went straight into her bedroom to change. Covens are like parties; what you wear is important. For this one, Miss Wrack slipped into a purple robe embroidered all over in yellow cross-stitch haddocks, and fastened her best brooch – a single sea slug mounted in plastic – on to the band which kept her frizzy hair in place. Then she went into the bathroom.
‘Come on, dear,’ she said, bending over the bath. ‘Time to get ready!’
What lived in Miss Wrack’s bath was, of course, her familiar. Familiars are the animals that help witches with their magic and are exceedingly important. Miss Wrack’s familiar was an octopus: a large animal with pale tentacles, suckers which left rings of blood where they had been, and vile red eyes. It was a girl octopus and its name was Doris.
‘Now don’t keep me waiting, dear,’ said Miss Wrack. She had fetched a polythene bucket from the bathroom cupboard and was trying to stuff Doris inside. ‘Tonight’s going to be an important night.’
But Doris was in a playful mood. As soon as one tentacle was in, another was out, and it was a rather bedraggled Miss Wrack who at last fixed on the lid, loaded the bucket on to an old perambulator and set off for the coven bus.
Ethel Feedbag’s familiar was not an octopus; it was a pig.
Ethel was a country witch who lived in a tumbledown cottage in a village to the west of Todcaster. She was a round-faced, rather simple person who liked to hack at mangel wurzels with her spade, make parsnip wine and shovel manure over absolutely everything, and just as people often grow to look like their dogs (or the other way round), Ethel had grown to look very like her pig. Both of them had round, pink cheeks and very large behinds. Both of them moved slowly on short hairy legs and grunted as they went along, and both of them had dun-coloured, sleepy little eyes.
Ethel had a job at the Egg Packing Station. It was a boring job because the eggs she packed were mostly rotten anyway so there was nothing for her to do, but she filled in by giving the sheep husk and turning the cows dry as she bicycled home of an evening. As for the plants in the hedgerow between the Egg Packing Station and Ethel’s cottage, there was scarcely one that wasn’t covered in mould or rust or hadn’t clusters of greedy greenfly sucking at its juices.
But tonight she rode straight home. Ethel was not a snappy dresser, but to make herself smart for the coven she rubbed down her Wellington boots with a handful of straw and changed her pinny for a clean one with felt tomatoes (showing felt tomato blight) stitched to the pocket. Then she started looking for something she could take to eat. There didn’t seem to be anything in the kitchen, but on the hearthrug in the living room she found a dead jackdaw which had fallen down the chimney.
‘That’ll roast a treat!’ said Ethel, scooping it up. Then she went down to the shed at the bottom of her garden to fetch her pig.
Nancy and Nora Shouter were twin witches who worked at Todcaster Central Station. They were an unusually disagreeable pair who hated passengers, hated each other and hated trains. As soon as Nancy went to the loudspeaker and announced that the Seven Fifty-Two to Edinburgh was approaching Platform Nine, Nora rushed to her loudspeaker and cackled into it that the Seven Fifty-Two had engine trouble and would be ninety minutes late and then it wouldn’t approach Platform Nine at all but would come in at Platform Five, if they were lucky.
So now, when they should have been getting ready for the coven, they were standing in their underclothes in the bedroom of their flat in Station Road, arguing about which of their familiars were which.
‘That is so my chicken!’ shouted Nora, tugging at the tail feathers of the unfortunate bird.
‘That is not your chicken,’ shrieked Nora. ‘That is your chicken over there!’
It was a most ridiculous argument. The Shouter girls were identical, with dyed red hair, long noses and smoke-stained fingertips. They dressed alike and slept in twin beds and they both had chickens for familiars which lived in wicker crates beneath their beds. And of course the chickens too, were very much alike. Chickens often are – fidgety brown birds who would peck your fingers as soon as look at you. But none of this made any difference to the Shouter twins, who went on bickering so long that they were very nearly late for the most important coven of their lives.
For many years now, the witches of Todcaster had met on Windylow Heath, a wild, wuthering sort of place with a few stunted thorn trees, a pond in which a gloomy lady had drowned herself on her wedding eve, and a single rock on which the Ancient Druids had done some dreadful deeds.
To get there, the witches hired a bus – the Coven Special – which left the bus depot at seven p.m. (No one had flown on a broomstick since a witch called Mrs Hockeridge had been sucked down the ventilation shaft of a Boeing 707 from Heathrow to Istanbul and nearly caused a very nasty mess indeed.)
The Shouter twins were still quarrelling when they got to the depot, but they stopped when they saw, standing on the pavement beside the bus, a small brown coffee table.
‘It’s her again,’ said Nancy.
‘Silly old crone,’ said Nora.
‘I’ve a good mind to stub out my fag on her,’ said Nancy, w ho as usual had a cigarette dangling from her lips.
They glared at the squat, round table whi
ch seemed to be swaying a little from side to side.
‘‘Tis a pity when they go simple like that,’ said Ethel Feedbag. She had loaded her pig on to the trailer and now came over and prodded the table leg with her Wellington boot.
The coffee table was in fact a very old witch called Mother Bloodwort who lived in a tumbledown shack near a disused quarry in the poorest part of town.
When she was young, Mother Bloodwort had been a formidable witch of the old school, bringing people out in boils, putting the evil eye on butchers who sold her gristly chops and casting spells on babies in perambulators so that their own mothers didn’t know them.
But now she was old. Her memory had gone and like many old people she got fancies. One of her fancies was to turn herself into a coffee table. There was no point in her being a coffee table: Mother Bloodwort did not drink coffee which was far too expensive, and since she lived alone there was no one who might have wanted to put a cup and saucer down on her. But she was a cranky old witch and every so often she remembered the spell that changed her from a white-haired, whiskery old woman into a low, oak table with carved legs and a glass top, and then there was no stopping her. What she did not often remember was how to turn herself back again.
‘Oh, come along,’ called Mabel Wrack from inside the bus. ‘Leave the silly old thing where she is.’
From her mermaid mother Mabel had inherited rather scaly legs which dried out easily and itched, so she wanted to get to Windylow Heath where the air was damp and cool.
But just then something happened. Two sparrows who’d been squabbling in the gutter lifted their heads and began to sing like nightingales. A flock of golden butterflies appeared from nowhere, and, drifting through the grimy bus station, came the scent of primroses with morning dew on them.
‘Ugh! It’s her!’ said Nancy Shouter. ‘I’m off.’ And she threw her chicken into the trailer and climbed into the bus.
‘Me too,’ said her twin. ‘I can’t stand her. I don’t know why they allow her in the coven. Really I don’t.’
Belladonna came slowly round the corner. She was a very young witch with thick, golden hair in which a short-eared bat hung like a little wrinkled prune. There was usually something in Belladonna’s hair: a fledgling blackbird parked there by its mother while she went to hunt for worms, a baby squirrel wanting somewhere safe to eat its hazel nuts or a butterfly who thought she was a lily or a rose. Belladonna’s nose turned up at the end, making a ledge for tired ladybirds to rest on; she had a high, clear forehead and eyes as blue as periwinkles. But as she came up to the bus she hesitated and looked troubled and sad, for she had learnt to expect only unkindness from the other witches.
Then she saw the coffee table and forgot her own troubles at once.
‘Oh, poor Mother Bloodwort! Have you forgotten the undoing spell again?’
The table began to rock and Belladonna put her arms round it. ‘Try to think,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you can remember. Was it a rhyming spell?’
The table rocked harder.
‘It was? Well, I’m sure it’ll come back in a minute.’ She leant her cheek against the glass top, sending healing thoughts into the old witch’s tired brain. ‘It’s coming back, I can feel it coming back . . .’
There was a swishing noise, Belladonna tumbled backwards and there, standing before her, was an old woman in a long mouse-bitten cloak and felt bedroom slippers with the sides cut out.
‘Thank you, my dear,’ croaked Mother Bloodwort. ‘You’re a kind girl even if you are—’
But she couldn’t bring herself to say the dreadful word – no black witch can. So she hobbled to the bus and began to heave herself aboard, clutching to her chest a large, square tin showing a picture of King George VIth’s Coronation on the lid. The tin should have gone in the trailer – there was a rule that all familiars travelled separately – but Mother Blood-wort never let it out of her sight. Inside it were hundreds of large white maggots which, when you blew on them, turned into a cloud of flies. One fly is no good for magic but a cloud of flies – flies in your hair, your eyes, your nose – that makes a very good familiar indeed.
Belladonna was the last to get into the bus. She alone of all the witches had no familiar. For white magic you do not need one. It was another thing that made her feel so very much alone.
Three
Belladonna had always been white. Even as a tiny baby she had used her witch’s teeth only to bite the tops off milk bottles so that the bluetits could get at the cream, and as she grew older her whiteness grew steadily worse. Flowers sprang up where she walked, bursts of glorious music fell from the air, and when she smiled, old gentlemen remembered the Christ-masses they had had when they were children. As for her hair – from the age of six or so when it had reached her waist, there had always been someone resting in Belladonna’s golden hair.
Belladonna herself longed for blackness – to smite and blast and wreck and wither seemed to her the most wonderful thing in the world. But though she could heal people and charm the flowers out of the ground and speak the language of the animals, even the simplest bit of evil like, say, turning a pale green cucumber into a greasy black pudding with bits of fat in it, was more than she could manage. Not that she didn’t try. Every morning before she went to work (she was an assistant in a flower shop) Belladonna would stand by the open window and say, ‘Every day and in every way I am getting blacker and blacker.’
But she wasn’t, and the worst thing she had to bear was the scorn and spite of the other witches. Belladonna really dreaded coven days when she was ignored and despised and had to huddle by herself out of the warm circle of firelight and feasting with only the familiars for company. The only reason she went was that she hoped, one day, some of the blackness might rub off on her.
The bus had left Todcaster now. There was one more witch to pick up on the way. She was a thin, pale witch whom the others called Monalot after a lady on a wireless programme who was always complaining. Monalot’s real name was Gwendolyn Swamp and she played the harp in the Todcaster Palm Orchestra. Miss Swamp came from a family of banshees, which are the kind of witch that wails and sighs about the place and tells people when something awful is going to happen. Banshees have never been a healthy bunch, and Monalot was so often ill that to get her to the coven at all they usually stopped the bus specially by her house.
‘She’s not at the gate,’ said Mabel Wrack, impatiently. The air-conditioning in the Coven Special was making her legs itch unbearably.
So Belladonna, who always took the messages and ran the errands for the others, climbed out of the bus and walked through the garden of Monalot’s little villa with the name Creepy Corner written on the gate.
The door was open. Belladonna ran up to the bedroom, knocked on the door – and saw at once that Monalot would not be coming to the coven. The poor witch was completely covered in small red spots.
‘It’s the measles,’ she moaned. ‘All over me. Percy too.’ She waved a limp hand to the corner of the room where her familiar, a large, sad-looking sheep, was lying. A sheep with measles is unusual, but where there is witchcraft anything is possible.
Belladonna was very upset
‘Couldn’t I help?’ she began.
But like most witches, Monalot hated the word ‘help’. ‘No,’ she moaned. ‘Just go and leave me. No one wants me anyway, nobody cares.’
So Belladonna poured her a drink, plumped up her pillows and went out, passing, on Monalot’s dressing table, wax images of her doctor and the district nurse, both stuck full of pins.
‘I’m afraid it’s hopeless,’ she reported, back in the bus. ‘Miss Swamp has the measles.’
‘Stupid old banshee,’ snapped Nora Shouter.
‘They were always delicate, the Swamps,’ said Mother Bloodwort. She had opened her tin with the Coronation on the lid and was stirring her maggots with a long and bony finger. She was still stirring and muttering when the bus got to Windylow Heath.
Two hours later t
he coven was in full swing. In the middle of the heath the bonfire roared and crackled, lighting up the Great Rock on which the Ancient Druids had done their dreadful deeds. The smell of burnt feathers from Ethel Feedbag’s roasted jackdaw rose hideously on the night air; clouds passed to and fro across the fitful moon. The witches had finished feasting and singing rude songs (the kind where ‘owl’ doesn’t just rhyme with ‘howl’ but with things like ‘bowel’ or ‘foul’) and were dancing back to back, or trying to. Ethel Feedbag’s Wellingtons did not help, nor the size of her behind as she lurched round with Mabel Wrack.
‘You’re going the wrong way, you stupid faggot,’ yelled Nancy over her shoulder to her twin. ‘It’s widdershins we should be going.’
‘This is widdershins, you half-witted cow-pat,’ Nora screamed back.
Mother Bloodwort did not dance any more. She sat as close to the fire as she could get, her mouse-bitten robe turned back so that the heat could get at her gnarled old legs. Every so often a handful of the flies that buzzed drunkenly round her head fell into the flames and vanished.
As for Belladonna, as usual she was left out in the cold. No one wanted to dance with her and anyway, like mothers who hand their children over to nannies and nursemaids, the witches had told Belladonna to take their familiars away to a little clump of thorn trees and keep them quiet.
This was easier said than done. As soon as the familiars saw Belladonna they always went to pieces. Ethel Feedbag’s enormous pig had collapsed like a felled tree and was lying on its back, its legs in the air, squealing for her to scratch its stomach. The Shouter chickens, who hadn’t laid anything in years, began to puff out their feathers and squawk, trying to please her with an egg, and Doris the octopus stuck a tentacle out of her plastic bucket and laid it softly on Belladonna’s knee.
Meanwhile, over by the fire, the witches grew wilder and wilder. Mother Bloodwort was knocking back a bottle of black liquid labelled Furniture Polish: Not for Human Consumption. Mabel Wrack was kicking her scaly legs higher and higher, showing off her garters of lungfish skin. The Shouter twins were hacking at each other’s shins.