The Witches Read online

  ‘That is not true!’ cried Mr Stringer.

  ‘You had better get the rat-catcher in at once,’ my grandmother said, ‘before I report you to the Public Health Authorities. I expect there's rats scuttling all over the kitchen floor and stealing the food off the shelves and jumping in and out of the soup!’

  ‘Never!’ cried Mr Stringer.

  ‘No wonder my breakfast toast was all nibbled round the edges this morning,’ my grandmother went on relentlessly. ‘No wonder it had a nasty ratty taste. If you're not careful, the Health people will be ordering the entire hotel to be closed before everyone gets typhoid fever.’

  ‘You are not being serious, madam,’ Mr Stringer said.

  ‘I was never more serious in my life,’ my grandmother said. ‘Are you or are you not going to allow my grandson to keep his white mice in his room?’

  The Manager knew when he was beaten. ‘May I suggest a compromise, madam?’ he said. ‘I will permit him to keep them in his room as long as they are never allowed out of the cage. How's that?’

  ‘That will suit us very well,’ my grandmother said, and she stood up and marched out of the room with me behind her.

  There is no way you can train mice inside a cage. Yet I dared not let them out because the chambermaid was spying on me all the time. She had a key to my door and she kept bursting in at all hours, trying to catch me with the mice out of the cage. She told me that the first mouse to break the rules would be drowned in a bucket of water by the hall-porter.

  I decided to seek a safer place where I could carry on with the training. There must surely be an empty room in this enormous hotel. I put one mouse into each trouser-pocket and wandered downstairs in search of a secret spot.

  The ground floor of the hotel was a maze of public rooms, all of them named in gold letters on the doors. I wandered through ‘The Lounge’ and ‘The Smoking-Room’ and ‘The Card-Room’ and ‘The Reading-Room’ and ‘The Drawing-Room’. None of them was empty. I went down a long wide corridor and at the end of it I came to ‘The Ballroom’. There were double-doors leading into it, and in front of the doors there was a large notice-board on a stand. The notice on the board said,

  RSPCC MEETING

  STRICTLY PRIVATE

  THIS ROOM IS RESERVED

  FOR THE

  ANNUAL MEETING

  OF

  THE ROYAL SOCIETY

  FOR THE PREVENTION

  OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN

  The double-doors into the room were open. I peeped in. It was a colossal room. There were rows and rows of chairs, all facing a platform. The chairs were painted gold and they had little red cushions on the seats. But there was not a soul in sight.

  I sidled cautiously into the room. What a lovely secret silent place it was. The meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children must have taken place earlier in the day, and now they had all gone home. Even if they hadn't, even if they did suddenly come pouring in, they would be wonderful kind people who would look with favour upon a young mouse-trainer going about his business.

  At the back of the room there was a large folding screen with Chinese dragons painted on it. I decided, just to be on the safe side, to go behind this screen and do my training there. I wasn't a bit frightened of the Prevention of Cruelty to Children people, but there was always a chance that Mr Stringer, the Manager, might pop his head round the door. If he did and if he saw the mice, the poor things would be in the hall-porter's bucket of water before I could shout stop.

  I tiptoed to the back of the room and settled myself on the thick green carpet behind the big screen. What a splendid place this was! Ideal for mouse-training! I took William and Mary out of my trouser-pockets. They sat beside me on the carpet, quiet and well-behaved.

  The trick I was going to teach them today was tight-rope walking. It is not all that difficult to train an intelligent mouse to be an expert tight-rope walker provided you know exactly how to go about it. First, you must have a piece of string. I had that. Then you must have some good cake. A fine currant cake is the favourite food of white mice. They are dotty about it. I had brought with me a rock cake which I had pocketed while having tea with Grandmamma the day before.

  Now here's what you do. You stretch the string tight between your two hands, but you start by keeping it very short, only about three inches. You put the mouse on your right hand and a little piece of cake on your left hand. The mouse is therefore only three inches away from the cake. He can see it and he can smell it. His whiskers twitch with excitement. He can almost reach the cake by leaning forward, but not quite. He only has to take two steps along the string to reach this tasty morsel. He ventures forward, one paw on the string, then the other. If the mouse has a good sense of balance, and most of them have, he will get across easily. I started with William. He walked the string without a moment's hesitation. I let him have a quick nibble of the cake just to whet his appetite. Then I put him back on my right hand.

  This time I lengthened the string. I made it about six inches long. William knew what to do now. With superb balance, he walked step by step along the string until he reached the cake. He was rewarded with another nibble.

  Quite soon, William was walking a twenty-four-inch tight-rope (or rather tight-string) from one hand to the other to reach the cake. It was wonderful to watch him. He was enjoying himself tremendously. I was careful to hold the string near the carpet so that if he did lose his balance, he wouldn't have far to fall. But he never fell. William was obviously a natural acrobat, a great tight-rope-walking mouse.

  Now it was Mary's turn. I put William on the carpet beside me and rewarded him with some extra crumbs and a currant. Then I started going through the same routine all over again with Mary. My blinding ambition, you see, my dream of dreams, was to become one day the owner of a White Mouse Circus. I would have a small stage with red curtains in front of it, and when the curtains were drawn apart, the audience would see my world-famous performing mice walking on tight-ropes, swinging from trapezes, turning somersaults in the air, bouncing on trampolines and all the rest of it. I would have white mice riding on white rats, and the rats would gallop furiously round and round the stage.

  I was beginning to picture myself travelling first-class all over the globe with my Famous White Mouse Circus, and performing before all the crowned heads of Europe.

  I was about halfway through Mary's training when suddenly I heard voices outside the Ballroom door. The sound grew louder. It swelled into a great babble of speech from many throats. I recognized the voice of the awful Hotel Manager, Mr Stringer.

  Help, I thought.

  But thank heavens for the huge screen.

  I crouched behind it and peered through the crack between two of the folding sections. I could see the entire length and width of the Ballroom without anyone seeing me.

  ‘Well, ladies, I am sure you will be quite comfortable in here,’ Mr Stringer's voice was saying. Then in through the double-doors he marched, black tail-coat and all, spreading his arms wide as he ushered in a great flock of ladies. ‘If there is anything we can do for you, do not hesitate to let me know,’ he went on. ‘Tea will be served for all of you on the Sunshine Terrace after you have concluded your meeting.’ With that, he bowed and scraped himself out of the room as a vast herd of ladies from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children came streaming in. They wore pretty clothes and all of them had hats on their heads.

  The Meeting

  Now that the Manager had gone, I was not particularly alarmed. What better than to be imprisoned in a room full of these splendid ladies? If I ever got talking to them, I might even suggest that they come and do a bit of cruelty-to-children preventing at my school. We could certainly use them there.

  In they came, talking their heads off. They began milling round and choosing their seats, and there was a whole lot of stuff like, ‘Come and sit next to me, Millie dear,’ and ‘Oh, hel-lo, Beatrice! I haven't seen you since the last meeting! Wh
at an adorable dress you have on!’

  I decided to stay where I was and let them get on with their meeting while I got on with my mouse-training, but I watched them for a while longer through the crack in the screen, waiting for them to settle down. How many were there? I guessed about two hundred. The back rows filled up first. They all seemed to want to sit as far back from the platform as possible.

  There was a lady wearing a tiny green hat in the middle of the back row who kept scratching the nape of her neck. She couldn't leave it alone. It fascinated me the way her fingers kept scratching away at the hair on the back of her neck. Had she known somebody was watching her from behind, I'm sure she would have been embarrassed. I wondered if she had dandruff. All of a sudden, I noticed that the lady next to her was doing the same thing!

  And the next one!

  And the next!

  The whole lot of them were doing it. They were all scratching away like mad at the hair on the backs of their necks!

  Did they have fleas in their hair?

  More likely it was nits.

  A boy at school called Ashton had had nits in his hair last term and the matron had made him dip his whole head in turpentine. It killed the nits all right, but it nearly killed Ashton as well. Half the skin came away from his scalp.

  I began to be fascinated by these hair-scratching ladies. It is always funny when you catch someone doing something coarse and she thinks no one is looking. Nose-picking, for example, or scratching her bottom. Hair-scratching is very nearly as unattractive, especially if it goes on and on.

  I decided it had to be nits.

  Then the most astonishing thing happened. I saw one lady pushing her fingers up underneath the hair on her head, and the hair, the entire head of hair, lifted upwards all in one piece, and the hand slid underneath the hair and went on scratching!

  She was wearing a wig! She was also wearing gloves! I glanced swiftly around at the rest of the now seated audience. Every one of them was wearing gloves!

  My blood turned to ice. I began to shake all over. I glanced frantically behind me for a back door to escape through. There wasn't one.

  Should I leap out from behind the screen and make a dash for the double-doors?

  Those double-doors were already closed and I could see a woman standing in front of them. She was bending forward and fixing some sort of a metal chain round the two door-handles.

  Keep still, I told myself. No one has seen you yet. There's no reason in the world why they should come and look behind the screen. But one false move, one cough, one sneeze, one nose-blow, one little sound of any sort and it won't be just one witch that gets you. It'll be two hundred!

  At that point, I think I fainted. The whole thing was altogether too much for a small boy to cope with. But I don't believe I was out for more than a few seconds, and when I came to, I was lying on the carpet and I was still, thank heavens, behind the screen. There was absolute silence all around me.

  Rather shakily, I got to my knees and peered once again through the crack in the screen.

  Frizzled Like a Fritter

  All the women, or rather the witches, were now sitting motionless in their chairs and staring as though hypnotized at somebody who had suddenly appeared on the platform. That somebody was another woman.

  The first thing I noticed about this woman was her size. She was tiny, probably no more than four and a half feet tall. She looked quite young, I guessed about twenty-five or six, and she was very pretty. She had on a rather stylish long black dress that reached right to the ground and she wore black gloves that came up to her elbows. Unlike the others, she wasn't wearing a hat.

  She didn't look to me like a witch at all, but she couldn't possibly not be one, otherwise what on earth was she doing up there on the platform? And why, for heaven's sake, were all the other witches gazing at her with such a mixture of adoration, awe and fear?

  Very slowly, the young lady on the platform raised her hands to her face. I saw her gloved fingers unhooking something behind her ears, and then… then she caught hold of her cheeks and lifted her face clean away! The whole of that pretty face came away in her hands!

  It was a mask!

  As she took off the mask, she turned sideways and placed it carefully upon a small table near by, and when she turned round again and faced us, I very nearly screamed out loud.

  That face of hers was the most frightful and frightening thing I have ever seen. Just looking at it gave me the shakes all over. It was so crumpled and wizened, so shrunken and shrivelled, it looked as though it had been pickled in vinegar. It was a fearsome and ghastly sight. There was something terribly wrong with it, something foul and putrid and decayed. It seemed quite literally to be rotting away at the edges, and in the middle of the face, around the mouth and cheeks, I could see the skin all cankered and worm-eaten, as though maggots were working away in there.

  There are times when something is so frightful you become mesmerized by it and can't look away. I was like that now. I was transfixed. I was numbed. I was magnetized by the sheer horror of this woman's features. But there was more to it than that. There was a look of serpents in those eyes of hers as they flashed around the audience.

  I knew immediately, of course, that this was none other than The Grand High Witch herself. I knew also why she had worn a mask. She could never have moved around in public, let alone book in at a hotel, with her real face. Everyone who saw her would have run away screaming.

  ‘The doors!’ shouted The Grand High Witch in a voice that filled the room and bounced around the walls. ‘Are they chained and bolted?’

  ‘The doors are chained and bolted, Your Grandness,’ answered a voice in the audience.

  The brilliant snake's eyes that were set so deep in that dreadful rotting worm-eaten face glared unblinkingly at the witches who sat facing her. ‘You may rrree-moof your gloves!’ she shouted.

  Her voice, I noticed, had that same hard metallic quality as the voice of the witch I had met under the conker tree, only it was far louder and much much harsher. It rasped. It grated. It snarled. It scraped. It shrieked. And it growled.

  Everyone in the room was peeling off her gloves. I was watching the hands of those in the back row. I wanted very much to see what their fingers looked like and whether my grandmother had been right. Ah!… Yes!… I could see several of them now! I could see the brown claws curving over the tips of the fingers!

  They were about two inches long, those claws, and sharp at the ends!

  ‘You may rrree-moof your shoes!’ barked The Grand High Witch.

  I heard a sigh of relief going up from all the witches in the room as they kicked off their narrow high-heeled shoes, and then I got a glimpse under the chairs of several pairs of stockinged feet, square and completely toeless. Revolting they were, as though the toes had been sliced away from the feet with a carving-knife.

  ‘You may rrree-moof your vigs!’ snarled The Grand High Witch. She had a peculiar way of speaking. There was some sort of a foreign accent there, something harsh and guttural, and she seemed to have trouble pronouncing the letter w. As well as that, she did something funny with the letter r. She would roll it round and round her mouth like a piece of hot pork-crackling before spitting it out. ‘Rrree-moof your vigs and get some fresh air into your spotty scalps!’ she shouted, and another sigh of relief arose from the audience as all the hands went up to the heads and all the wigs (with the hats still on them) were lifted away.

  There now appeared in front of me row upon row of bald female heads, a sea of naked scalps, every one of them red and itchy-looking from being rubbed by the linings of the wigs. I simply cannot tell you how awful they were, and somehow the whole sight was made more grotesque because underneath those frightful scabby bald heads, the bodies were dressed in fashionable and rather pretty clothes. It was monstrous. It was unnatural.

  Oh, heavens, I thought. Oh, help! Oh, Lord have mercy on me! These foul bald-headed females are child-killers every one of them, and here I
am imprisoned in the same room and I can't escape!

  At that point, a new and doubly horrifying thought struck me. My grandmother had said that with their special nose-holes they could smell out a child on a pitch-black night from right across the other side of the road. Up to now, my grandmother had been right every time. It seemed a certainty therefore that one of the witches in the back row was going to sniff me out at any moment and then the yell of ‘Dogs’ droppings!’ would go up all over the room and I would be cornered like a rat.

  I knelt on the carpet behind the screen, hardly daring to breathe.

  Then suddenly I remembered another very important thing my grandmother had told me. ‘The dirtier you are,’ she had said, ‘the harder it is for a witch to smell you out.’

  How long since I had last had a bath?

  Not for ages. I had my own room in the hotel and my grandmother never bothered with silly things like that. Come to think of it, I don't believe I'd had a bath since we arrived.

  When had I last washed my hands or face?

  Certainly not this morning.

  Not yesterday either.

  I glanced down at my hands. They were covered with smudge and mud and goodness knows what else besides.

  So perhaps I had a chance after all. The stink-waves couldn't possibly get out through all that dirt.

  ‘Vitches of Inkland!’ shouted The Grand High Witch. She herself I noticed had not taken off either her wig or her gloves or her shoes. ‘Vitches of Inkland!’ she yelled.

  The audience stirred uneasily and sat up straighter in their chairs.

  ‘Miserrrable vitches!’ she yelled. ‘Useless lazy vitches! Feeble frrribbling vitches! You are a heap of idle good-for-nothing vurms!’

  A shudder went through the audience. The Grand High Witch was clearly in an ugly mood and they knew it. I had a feeling that something awful was going to happen soon.