The Witches Read online

  The audience became silent and sat down.

  ‘These mice are nothing to do vith me!’ she shouted. ‘These mice are pet mice! These mice are qvite obviously belonging to some rrreepellent little child in the hotel! A boy it vill be for a certainty because girls are not keeping pet mice!’

  ‘A boy!’ cried the witches. ‘A filthy smelly little boy! We'll swipe him! We'll swizzle him! We'll have his tripes for breakfast!’

  ‘Silence!’ shouted The Grand High Witch, raising her hands. ‘You know perrrfectly vell you must do nothing to drrraw attention to yourselves vhile you are living in the hotel! Let us by all means get rrrid of this evil-smelling little sqvirt, but vee must do it as qvietly as possible, for are vee not all of us the most rrree-spectable ladies of the Rrroyal Society for the Prrree-vention of Crrruelty to Children?’

  ‘What do you suggest then, O Brainy One?’ they cried out. ‘How shall we dispose of this small pile of filth?’

  They're talking about me, I thought. These females are actually talking about how to kill me. I began to sweat.

  ‘Whoever he is, he is not important,’ announced The Grand High Witch. ‘Leave him to me. I shall smell him out and turn him into a mackerel and have him dished up for supper.’

  ‘Bravo!’ cried the witches. ‘Cut off his head and chop off his tail and fry him in hot butter!’

  You can imagine that none of this was making me feel very comfortable. William and Mary were still running around on the platform, and I saw The Grand High Witch aim a swift running kick at William. She caught him right on the point of her toe and sent him flying. She did the same to Mary. Her aim was extraordinary. She would have made a great football player. Both mice crashed against the wall, and for a few moments they lay stunned. Then they got to their feet and scampered away.

  ‘Attention again!’ The Grand High Witch was shouting. ‘I vill now give to you the rrrecipe for concocting Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker! Get out pencils and paper.’

  Handbags were opened all over the room and notebooks were fished out.

  ‘Give us the recipe, O Brainy One!’ cried the audience impatiently. ‘Tell us the secret.’

  ‘First,’ said The Grand High Witch, ‘I had to find something that vould cause the children to become very small very qvickly.’

  ‘And what was that?’ cried the audience.

  ‘That part vos simple,’ said The Grand High Witch. ‘All you have to do if you are vishing to make a child very small is to look at him through the wrrrong end of a telescope.’

  ‘She's a wonder!’ cried the audience. ‘Who else would have thought of a thing like that?’

  ‘So you take the wrrrong end of a telescope,’ continued The Grand High Witch, ‘and you boil it until it gets soft.’

  ‘How long does that take?’ they asked her.

  ‘Tventy-vun hours of boiling,’ answered The Grand High Witch. ‘And vhile this is going on, you take exactly forty-five brrrown mice and you chop off their tails vith a carving-knife and you fry the tails in hair-oil until they are nice and crrrisp.’

  ‘What do we do with all those mice who have had their tails chopped off?’ asked the audience.

  ‘You simmer them in frog-juice for vun hour,’ came the answer. ‘But listen to me. So far I have only given you the easy part of the rrrecipe. The rrreally difficult problem is to put in something that vill have a genuine delayed action rrree-sult, something that can be eaten by children on a certain day but vhich vill not start vurrrking on them until nine o'clock the next morning vhen they arrive at school.’

  ‘What did you come up with, O Brainy One?’ they called out. ‘Tell us the great secret!’

  ‘The secret,’ announced The Grand High Witch triumphantly, ‘is an alarm-clock!’

  ‘An alarm-clock!’ they cried. ‘It's a stroke of genius!’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said The Grand High Witch.

  ‘You can set a tventy-four-hour alarm-clock today and at exactly nine o'clock tomorrow it vill go off.’

  ‘But we will need five million alarm-clocks!’ cried the audience. ‘We will need one for each child!’

  ‘Idiots!’ shouted The Grand High Witch. ‘If you are vonting a steak, you do not cook the whole cow! It is the same vith alarm-clocks. Vun clock vill make enough for a thousand children. Here is vhat you do. You set your alarm-clock to go off at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. Then you rrroast it in the oven until it is crrrisp and tender. Are you wrrriting this down?’

  ‘We are, Your Grandness, we are!’ they cried.

  ‘Next,’ said The Grand High Witch, ‘you take your boiled telescope and your frrried mouse-tails and your cooked mice and your rrroasted alarm-clock and all together you put them into the mixer. Then you mix them at full speed. This vill give you a nice thick paste. Vhile the mixer is still mixing you must add to it the yolk of vun grrruntle's egg.’

  ‘A gruntle's egg!’ cried the audience. ‘We shall do that!’

  Underneath all the clamour that was going on I heard one witch in the back row saying to her neighbour, ‘I'm getting a bit old to go bird's nesting. Those ruddy gruntles always nest very high up.’

  ‘So you mix in the egg,’ The Grand High Witch went on, ‘and vun after the other you also mix in the following items: the claw of a crrrabcrrruncher, the beak of a blabbersnitch, the snout of a grrrobblesqvirt and the tongue of a catsprrringer. I trust you are not having any trrrouble finding those.’

  ‘None at all!’ they cried out. ‘We will spear the blabbersnitch and trap the crabcruncher and shoot the grobblesquirt and catch the catspringer in his burrow!’

  ‘Excellent!’ said The Grand High Witch. ‘Vhen you have mixed everything together in the mixer, you vill have a most marvellous-looking grrreen liqvid. Put vun drop, just vun titchy droplet, of this liqvid into a chocolate or a sveet, and at nine o'clock the next morning the child who ate it vill turn into a mouse in tventy-six seconds! But vun vurd of vorning. Never increase the dose. Never put more than vun drrrop into each sveet or chocolate. And never give more than vun sweet or chocolate to each child. An overdose of Delayed Action Mouse-Maker vill mess up the timing of the alarm-clock and cause the child to turn into a mouse too early. A large overdose might even have an instant effect, and you vouldn't vont that, vould you? You vouldn't vont the children turning into mice rrright there in your sveet-shops. That vould give the game away. So be very carrreful! Do not overdose!’

  Bruno Jenkins Disappears

  The Grand High Witch was starting to talk again. ‘I am now going to prrrove to you,’ she said, ‘that this rrrecipe is vurrrking to perrrfection. You understand, of course, that you can set the alarm-clock to go off at any time you like. It does not have to be nine o'clock. So yesterday I am personally prrree-paring a small qvantity of the magic formula in order to give to you a public demonstration. But I am making vun small change in the rrrecipe. Before I am rrroasting the alarm-clock, I am setting it to go off, not at nine o'clock the next morning, but at half-past thrrree the next afternoon. Vhich means half-past thrrree this afternoon. And that,’ she said, glancing at her wrist-watch, ‘is in prrree-cisely seven minutes’ time!’

  The audience of witches was listening intently, sensing that something dramatic was about to happen.

  ‘So vot am I doing yesterday vith this magic liqvid?’ asked The Grand High Witch. ‘I vill tell you vot I am doing. I am putting vun drrroplet of it into a very sqvishy chocolate bar and I am giving this bar to a rrree-pulsive smelly little boy who is hanging rrround the lobby of the hotel.’

  The Grand High Witch paused. The audience remained silent, waiting for her to go on.

  ‘I votched this rrree-pulsive little brrrute gobbling up the sqvishy bar of chocolate and vhen he had finished, I said to him, “Vos that good?” He said it vos great. So I said to him, “Vould you like some more?” And he said, “Yes.” So I said, “I vill give you six more chocolate bars like that if you vill meet me in the Ballroom of this hotel at tventy-five-past thrr
ree tomorrow afternoon.” “Six bars!” cried this greedy little svine. “I'll be there! You bet I'll be there!”

  ‘So the stage is set!’ shouted The Grand High Witch. ‘The prrroof of the pudding is about to begin! Do not forget that before I am rrroasting the alarm-clock yesterday, I am setting it for half-past thrrree today. It is now’ – she glanced again at her watch – ‘it is now exactly tventy-five minutes past thrrree and the nasty little stinker who vill be turning into a mouse in five minutes’ time should at this very moment be standing outside the doors!’

  And by gum, she was absolutely right. The boy, whoever he might be, was already rattling the door-handle and banging on the doors with his fist.

  ‘Qvick!’ shrieked The Grand High Witch. ‘Put on your vigs! Put on your gloves! Put on your shoes!’

  There was a great rustle and bustle of putting on wigs and gloves and shoes, and I saw The Grand High Witch herself reach for her face-mask and put it on over that revolting face of hers. It was astonishing how that mask transformed her. All of a sudden she became once again a rather pretty young lady.

  ‘Let me in!’ came the boy's voice from behind the doors. ‘Where are those chocolate bars you promised me? I'm here to collect! Dish them out!’

  ‘He is not only smelly, he is also grrreedy,’ said The Grand High Witch. ‘Rrree-moof the chains from the doors and let him come in.’ The extraordinary thing about the mask was that its lips moved quite naturally when she spoke. You really couldn't see it was a mask at all.

  One of the witches leapt to her feet and unfastened the chains. She opened the two huge doors. Then I heard her saying, ‘Why hello, little man. How lovely to see you. You have come for your chocolate bars, have you not? They are all ready for you. Do come in.’

  A small boy wearing a white T-shirt and grey shorts and gymshoes entered the room. I recognized him at once. He was called Bruno Jenkins and he was staying in the hotel with his parents. I didn't care for him. He was one of those boys who is always eating something whenever you meet him. Meet him in the hotel lobby and he is stuffing sponge cake into his mouth. Pass him in the corridor and he is fishing potato crisps out of a bag by the fistful. Catch sight of him in the hotel garden and he is wolfing a Dairy Milk Bar and has two more sticking out of his trouser-pocket. What's more, Bruno never stopped boasting about how his father made more money than my father and that they owned three cars. But worse than that, yesterday morning I had found him kneeling on the flagstones of the hotel terrace with a magnifying-glass in his hand. There was a column of ants marching across one of the flagstones and Bruno Jenkins was focusing the sun through his magnifying-glass and roasting the ants one by one. ‘I like watching them burn,’ he said. ‘That's horrible!’ I cried. ‘Stop doing it!’ ‘Let's see you stop me,’ he said. At that point I had pushed him with all my might and he had crashed sideways on to the flagstones. His magnifying-glass had splintered into many pieces and he had leapt up shrieking, ‘My father is going to get you for this!’ Then he had run off, presumably to find his wealthy dad. That was the last time I had seen Bruno Jenkins until now. I doubted very much that he was about to be turned into a mouse, although I must confess that I was secretly hoping it might happen. Either way, I didn't envy him being up there in front of all those witches.

  ‘Darling boy,’ cooed The Grand High Witch from up on the platform. ‘I have your chocolates all rrready for you. Do come up here firrrst and say hello to all these lovely ladies.’ Her voice was quite different now. It was soft and gentle and absolutely dripping with syrup.

  Bruno was looking a bit bewildered, but he allowed himself to be led up on to the platform, where he stood beside The Grand High Witch and said, ‘OK, where are my six bars of chocolate?’

  I saw the witch who had let him in quietly putting the chain back on the door-handles. Bruno didn't notice this. He was too busy asking for his chocolate.

  ‘The time is now vun minute before half-past thrrree!’ announced The Grand High Witch.

  ‘What the heck's going on?’ Bruno asked. He wasn't frightened, but he wasn't looking exactly comfortable either. ‘What is this?’ he said. ‘Gimme my chocolate!’

  ‘Thirty seconds to go!’ cried The Grand High Witch, gripping Bruno by the arm. Bruno shook himself clear and stared at her. She stared back at him, smiling with the lips of her mask. Every witch in the audience was staring at Bruno.

  ‘Tventy seconds!’ cried The Grand High Witch.

  ‘Gimme the chocolate!’ shouted Bruno, becoming suddenly suspicious. ‘Gimme the chocolate and let me out of here!’

  ‘Fifteen seconds!’ cried The Grand High Witch.

  ‘Will one of you crazy punks kindly tell me what all this is about?’ shouted Bruno.

  ‘Ten seconds!’ cried The Grand High Witch. ‘Nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… thrrree… two… vun… zero! Vee have ignition!’

  I could have sworn I heard an alarm-clock ringing. I saw Bruno jump. He jumped as though someone had stuck a hatpin deep into his bottom and he yelled ‘Ow!’ He jumped so high that he landed on a small table up there on the stage, and he started hopping about on the top of this table, waving his arms and yelling his head off. Then suddenly he became silent. His whole body stiffened.

  ‘The alarm has gone off!’ shrieked The Grand High Witch. ‘The Mouse-Maker is beginning to vurrrk!’ She started hopping about on the platform and clapping her gloved hands together and then she shouted out,

  ‘This smelly brrrat, this filthy scum

  This horrid little louse

  Vill very very soon become

  A lovely little MOUSE!’

  Bruno was getting smaller by the second. I could see him shrinking…

  Now his clothes seemed to be disappearing and brown fur was growing all over his body…

  Suddenly he had a tail…

  And then he had whiskers…

  Now he had four feet…

  It was all happening so quickly…

  It was a matter of seconds only…

  And all at once he wasn't there any more…

  A small brown mouse was running around on the table top…

  ‘Bravo!’ yelled the audience. ‘She's done it! It works! It's fantastic! It's colossal! It's the greatest yet! You are a miracle, O Brainy One!’ They were all standing up and clapping and cheering and The Grand High Witch produced a mouse-trap from the folds of her dress and started to set it.

  Oh no! I thought. I don't want to see this! Bruno Jenkins may have been a bit of a stinker but I'm dashed if I want to watch him having his head chopped off!

  ‘Vhere is he?’ snapped The Grand High Witch, searching the platform. ‘Vhere has that mouse got to?’

  She couldn't find him. Clever Bruno must have jumped down off the table and scampered off into some corner or even down a small hole. Thank heavens for that.

  ‘It matters not!’ shouted The Grand High Witch. ‘Silence and sit down!’

  The Ancient Ones

  The Grand High Witch stood on the very centre of the platform, and those dangerous eyes of hers travelled slowly around the audience of witches who were sitting so meekly before her. ‘All those over seventy put up your hands!’ she barked suddenly.

  Seven or eight hands went up in the air.

  ‘It comes to me,’ said The Grand High Witch, ‘that you ancient vuns vill not be able to climb high trrrees in search of grrruntles’ eggs.’

  ‘We won't, Your Grandness! We are afraid we won't!’ chanted the ancient ones.

  ‘Nor vill you be able to catch the crrrabcrrruncher, who lives high up on rrrocky cliffs,’ The Grand High Witch went on. ‘I can't exactly see you sprrrinting after the speedy catsprrringer either, or diving into deep vorters to spear the blabbersnitch, or striding the bleak moors vith a gun under your arm to shoot the grrrobblesqvirt. You are too old and feeble for those things.’

  ‘We are,’ chanted the ancient ones. ‘We are! We are!’

  ‘You ancient vuns have served me vell ove
r many years,’ said The Grand High Witch, ‘and I do not vish to deny you the pleasure of bumping off a few thousand children each just because you have become old and feeble. I have therefore prepared personally vith my own hands a limited qvantity of Delayed Action Mouse-Maker vhich I vill distrrribute to the ancient vuns before you leave the hotel.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’ cried the old witches. ‘You are far too good to us, Your Grandness! You are so kind and thoughtful!’

  ‘Here is a sample of vot I am giving you,’ shouted The Grand High Witch. She fished around in a pocket of her dress and brought out a very small bottle. She held it up and shouted, ‘In this tiny bottle is five hundred doses of Mouse-Maker! Is enough to turrrn five hundred children into mice!’ I could see that the bottle was made of dark-blue glass and that it was very small, about the same size as the ones you can buy at the chemist with nose-drops in them. ‘Each of you ancient vuns vill get two of these bottles!’ she shouted.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, O Most Generous and Thoughtful One!’ chorused the ancient witches. ‘Not one drop will be wasted! Each of us will promise to squish and squallop and squiggle one thousand children!’

  ‘Our meeting is over!’ announced The Grand High Witch. ‘Here is the time-table for the rrreemainder of your stay in this hotel.

  ‘Rrright now, vee must all go out on to the Sunshine Terrace and have tea vith that rrridiculous Manager.

  ‘Next, at six o'clock tonight, those vitches who are too old to climb trees after grrruntles’ eggs vill rrree-port to my rrroom to rrree-ceive two bottles each of Mouse-Maker. My rrroom number is 454. Do not forget it.

  ‘Then, at eight o'clock, all of you vill assemble in the Dining-Rrroom for supper. Vee are the lovely ladies of the RSPCC and they are setting up two long tables specially for us. But do not forget to put the cotton plugs up your noses. That Dining-Rrroom vill be full of filthy little children and vithout the nose-plugs the stink vill be unbearrable. Apart from that, rrree-member to behave normally at all times. Is everything clear? Any qvestions?’