‘I can’t help wondering why he is sitting in a broom cupboard,’ said Belladonna.
‘I’ll tell you why, ’ s a id Lester frowning. ‘Because he’s waiting for Sir Simon, that’s why. Favourite spot of Sir Simon’s, the broom cupboard.’
‘Is that the rather dead-looking gentleman he speaks to sometimes?’ enquired Belladonna.
Lester nodded. ‘Very dead-looking. Died in 1583,’ he said. ‘Murdered all seven of his wives.’
Mr Leadbetter put down his papers and came over, and together the ogre and the secretary looked over Belladonna’s shoulder at their employer. Sure enough, a wavering shadow appeared on the surface of the mirror and Arriman rose eagerly to his feet.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Lester, shaking his enormous head. ‘He’s been trying to bring Sir Simon back to life for years, but since the coven he’s been at it all the time. When I brought him his egg this morning he was sitting up in bed with this huge book – Necromancy it was called. Nasty.’
‘I wouldn’t worry, ’ s a id Mr Leadbetter. ‘I believe it’s two hundred years since anyone managed to raise a ghost.’
But he was a little more anxious than he admitted. Suppose Arriman did manage it? A man who had murdered all seven of his wives did not seem to be a good person to have around in a house where there was soon to be a wedding.
An hour later the witches were all assembled in the cocktail lounge of the hotel waiting for Mr Leadbetter to tell them the rules of the contest. They had taken a lot of trouble to make themselves smart. Mabel Wrack
had plaited her frizzy hair with a string of dogfish egg-cases, Mother Bloodwort’s chin sprouted a brand-new piece of sticking plaster, and Ethel Feedbag had nobly left her wellies upstairs and was in bedsocks.
‘Are we all here?’ asked Mr Leadbetter, letting his eyes rest for a moment on Belladonna, sitting quietly apart from the others on a stool.
‘No,’ said Nancy Shouter, jangling her knucklebone ear-rings. ‘Silly old Monalot’s not here.’
Mr Leadbetter sighed. Miss Swamp had sent in her entrance form, but so far there had been no sign of her, and he was a person who hated muddle.
‘No point in her going in for the competition anyway,’ said Mabel Wrack. ‘A flabby old banshee like that.’
‘And that sheep of hers. Gives me the bots!’ said Ethel Feedbag.
The others nodded. It was true that Percy really was a most depressing animal: the kind that always thinks other sheep are having a better life than he is, and eating greener grass and doing more.
‘Well, we shall have to begin without her,’ said Mr Leadbetter.
But just then the hotel porter came in and whispered something to Mr Leadbetter whose face brightened. ‘Show her in please,’ he said. ‘We’re expecting another lady.’
But the new witch didn’t seem to be someone one showed in. The new witch came striding in like a queen and as she came the other witches shrank back in their chairs and Belladonna drew in her breath.
Because the new witch was not Monalot. Nothing less like the pale, sickly Miss Swamp could be
imagined. The new witch was very tall with black hair piled high on her head. She had long, blood-red fingernails and round her shoulders she wore a cape of puppy skin. Her fingers and wrists sparkled with jewels, but the necklace wound round her throat was, unexpectedly, not of pearls or diamonds but of human teeth. But what startled the others most was the new witch’s familiar. Dragging behind her on a rhinestone-studded lead there came a grey, lumbering animal with a snout like a hoover and wicked-looking claws.
‘What is it?’ whispered Mother Bloodwort, who could never scrape up enough money to go to the zoo.
‘I think it’s an aardvark,’ Belladonna whispered back.
‘Good evening,’ said the new witch. ‘I am Madame Olympia. I have come to take part in the competition.’
‘I’m afraid there’s been some mistake,’ said Mr Leadbetter. ‘The competition is limited to the witches of Todcaster.’
Madame Olympia smiled – a smile that sent shivers down one’s spine.
‘I am a witch of Todcaster,’ she said.
‘How can that be?’ began Mr Leadbetter. ‘We—’
‘I have bought Miss Gwendolyn Swamp’s house, Creep Corner,’ interrupted the newcomer, dropping the rhinestone lead carelessly on to a chair. ‘Too small for me, of course, but not without charm. Miss Swamp found she wanted to travel.’
‘Monalot never wanted to travel,’ said Mother Bloodwort stoutly. ‘ Travel brought her out in spots
an’ all sorts. It was all you could do to get Monalot down the road for a bag of bulls’ eyes.’
‘She is travelling now, however,’ said Madame Olympia with another of her sinister smiles. ‘Oh, yes, she is definitely travelling now. Somewhere round Turkey I would guess.’
She opened her crocodile-skin handbag and began to powder her nose. And when she saw the vain, proud look that Madame Olympia threw at herself in the mirror, Belladonna suddenly understood what kind of a person the new witch was. She was an enchantress, one of the oldest and most evil kind of witch there is. Morgan le Fay, the one who caused the death of the great King Arthur was one, and Circe, who turned brave Ulysses’ men to swine. Enchantresses are beautiful, but it is an evil beauty. They use it to snare men and make them helpless and tear from them the secrets of their power. And when they have got all they want from them, they destroy them.
‘Well, madam, I suppose you had better let me have your entrance form,’ said Mr Leadbetter. Fair was fair, and if the new witch now lived in Todcaster she was eligible to join. But he felt very unhappy as he wrote her name down on the register. Mr Lead-better didn’t know much about enchantresses, but there was something about Madame Olympia that made his blood run cold.
Not only was Madame Olympia not a witch of Todcaster, she wasn’t a Witch of the North at all. She lived in London where she kept a Beauty Parlour. It was a wicked place. Stupid women were lured into it and assured they would become young and
beautiful if they let themselves be pummelled and pounded and smeared with sticky creams and have their faces lifted and their stomach flattened. They paid a lot of money to Madame Olympia who would put a little bit of magic into the creams and ointments that she used so that at first they did look marvellous. But it was the kind of magic that wore off very quickly, leaving the women even uglier than before so that they would rush back to her and pay her more money and the whole thing would start again. She was also horrid to the girls she employed and paid them too little and bullied them.
Madame Olympia had had five husbands. All these husbands had disappeared in very odd ways, mostly after they had made wills leaving her all their money. She said that they had died, but it was odd that a werewolf with weak, blue eyes and a bald patch had appeared in Epping Forest, very much frightening the inhabitants, just after she had reported her first husband’s death. The second and third husbands had vanished within a year of each other, and each time the girls in the Beauty Parlour were struck by the way Madame’s necklace of human teeth suddenly got very much longer. The fourth Mr Olympia really did run his Jaguar into a lamp-post, but the fifth . . . well, no one knew for certain what had happened to him, but the coffin in which he was carried to his funeral was most suspiciously light.
And now she was after Arriman the Awful, Wizard of the North!
As soon as she had heard of the competition she had come straight up to Todcaster and ‘persuaded’ Monalot to sell her house. Monalot hadn’t wanted to go, of course: she’d sobbed and moaned and pleaded; after all, she wasn’t a banshee for nothing. But by the time Madame Olympia had suggested just a few of the things she might do to her, and to Percy, if she didn’t, Monalot had been very glad to sell her house and take a nice package tour round the world. Very glad indeed.
Mr Leadbetter had begun to explain the rules of the competition. The witches were to wear black gowns and masks so that the judges would not go by the way they looked bu
t by the blackness of their magic. They were to draw numbers out of a hat and do their tricks in the order that they drew. They were to hand in a list of anything they might need for the contest: dragons’ blood, sieves to go to sea in and so on, so that they would be ready in good time . . .
Madame Olympia hardly bothered to listen. One look at the other witches and she had known she would win. The little golden-haired thing was quite fetching, but anyone could see what was wrong with her. Oh, yes, she’d be Queen of Darkington all right. And then . . .!
Hardly waiting for Mr Leadbetter to finish, she rose to her feet and stretched. ‘See that my aardvark is watered and fed, please,’ she ordered carelessly. ‘I’m going to change for dinner.’
And she glided out of the room, leaving the other witches boiling and bubbling with indignation.
‘Cocky, s neering cow, who does she think she is?’ said Nancy Shouter. ‘Hope she drops dead.’
And for once, her twin agreed with her.
It was a long time before Belladonna slept that night. Dinner had been excellent, but even before the piece of sticking plaster fell from Mother Bloodwort’s chin into her mushroom soup, Belladonna had not been really hungry. T hen there was a fuss about Ethel Feedbag who had a double bed and wanted to share it with her pig, and when Belladonna got to her room at last there was still Doris in the bath, waving to her and wanting to be noticed.
But it was none of that that worried Belladonna. It was the glimpse she had had, passing an open door, of Madame Olympia, standing in a gold négligé, her black hair falling round her shoulders, the aardvark cowering at her feet. She was looking into the magic mirror that had been left for Monalot and laughing – a low and truly evil sound.
‘You wanted Power and Darkness, you Wizard of the North,’ Belladonna heard her say. ‘Well, Power and Darkness you shall have!’
And it was with the sound of the new witch’s horrible laughter still in her ears that Belladonna fell asleep at last.
Five
Belladonna was still worried when she awoke. It seemed to her certain that Madame Olympia would win the competition and become Mrs Canker, and she feared most dreadfully for Arriman.
She got up and went to the open window and at once a family of bluetits flew on to her shoulder and started telling her a long story about a nesting box which wasn’t fit for a flea to sleep in and the shocking way that people carried on, taking their milk bottles in too soon and keeping cats.
Belladonna sighed. She could cope with one bluetit in her hair, but a whole family always gave her a headache.
‘You can stay, but in my straw basket,’ she said, managing for once to be firm.
Doris, fortunately, was still asleep, her body bleached to the whiteness of the bath, her vile eyes peacefully closed. Belladonna cleaned her teeth and went downstairs. The rooms were deserted and silent still. She didn’t feel like the other witches this morning; she didn’t feel like anybody. And slipping out of a side door into the street, she began to walk away from the hotel.
She walked and she walked and she walked, letting her feet carry her where they would, and presently she found that she had left the pleasant gardens and smart shops which surounded the Grand Spa Hotel and was in a poor and slummy part of the town where the houses were neglected and dirty, orange peel and broken glass littered the gutters and mangy dogs foraged in the dustbins.
She crossed a mean little square with a few dusty laurel bushes, a boarded-up lemonade stall and a public lavatory, And found herself in front of a large, grey building with curtains the colour of bile. A flight of mottled stone steps led from the side of the building into a patch of gravel and scuffed earth which might once have been a garden. And there, hunched on the low wall which ran beside the pavement was a small boy. He was looking down at something that he held cupped in his skinny hands and making that kind of hiccuping noise that people make when they are trying not to cry.
What was cupped in the boy’s hands was an earthworm. And the name of the boy – a name he hated – was Terence Mugg.
When he was a very small baby, Terence Mugg had been found wrapped in a newspaper in a telephone kiosk behind the railway station. The newspaper had smelt of vinegar, and the lady who found it had thought at first that it was a packet of fish and chips. However, when the fish and chips packet burst and put out a small, pink hand she screamed and ran for a policeman.
At the police station, Terence was fed and clothed and photographed in the arms of a pretty police lady. But when his picture appeared in the paper no one said, ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’ and ‘Isn’t he sweet?’, and no one wrote in offering to adopt him (though an old gentleman wrote in offering to adopt the police lady). Terence just wasn’t that kind of baby. There were even people cruel enough to say they might have left him in a telephone kiosk themselves.
So poor Terence was sent to the Sunnydene Children’s Home in the most dismal part of Todcaster and Matron christened him ‘Terence’ after an actor she fancied at the time and ‘Mugg’ because she said, ‘With a mug like that, what else can he be called?’
Babies in children’s homes usually get adopted quite quickly, but not Terence. Not only was he an unusually plain baby, but he spent the first five years of his life getting not only chicken pox and whooping cough but really quite unusual things like brain fever and dermatitis and croup. Naturally nobody wants to adopt a baby whose entire head is swathed in banadages or whose face is covered with spots or who can’t digest cheese without turning as yellow as a lentil. By the time he was five and had started at the local school, Terence had quite given up hope of finding a family of his own to love him.
‘We’ll have that one with us for life,’ Matron would say nastily as Terence crept past her like a battered little snail. ‘No Mrs Right’s going to come along for him.’
People who are lonely and unloved often turn to animals for company and that was what Terence had done. Only, of course, at the Sunnydene Children’s Home, Matron did not allow proper pets. So it was little things – small spiders and hurrying woodlice and shiny beetles – that Terence played with when he was out in the waste patch they called a garden, or found under paving stones on the way to school.
It was in this way that he had found Rover.
Rover was an earthworm, a pale pink, slender animal with a mauve bulge in the middle, a pointed end and a peaceful way of crawling along the ground.
Terence had liked him immediately. There was something a little special about Rover. He did not seem quite like other worms who often appear to have no notion of doing anything beyond burrowing down into the soil. Rover would curl into knots around Terence’s fingers or lie quietly in the palm of his hand, and sometimes he would rear up his pointed end in a most intelligent way. Terence had found him in a tub of earth outside a chemist’s shop and he’d sneaked him into the Home and found a place for him in the garden – a jam jar filled with leaf mould which he was careful to keep damp because his teacher had told him that earthworms breathe through their skins and should never get dry. He’d buried the jam jar behind a pile of bricks and told no one – only Billy who was deaf and hadn’t been adopted either. Billy was another person who didn’t bother living things.
And there Rover had lived as happily as anything until last night when Matron had found Terence and Billy talking to him when they should have been inside getting ready for bed.
‘How dare you!’ she had shouted, charging down the garden like an ill-tempered camel. ‘Come inside at once! And throw that disgusting, insanitary worm away immediately!’
And when Terence did not instantly do what he was told she snatched Rover’s jar and turned it upside down, scuffing at the leaf mould with her sharp and spiky shoes.
She had hurt Rover. Hurt him badly. He was no better this morning: there was a wound in his middle where the skin was broken and his inside was spilling out in a terrible way. Rover wasn’t moving, either; he just lay there, perfectly still and stretched in Terence’s hand.
&
nbsp; He was going to die.
‘Hello!’ said a soft and musical voice above his head, and Terence, looking up, saw the most beautiful girl he had ever seen – a girl he would have been frightened of except that her blue eyes looked sad, and sadness was something Terence knew about. ‘My name is Belladonna,’ the gentle voice went on. ‘What’s yours?’
The little boy flushed. ‘Terence Mugg,’ he said, staring up at her through his big, steel-rimmed spectacles. ‘And this,’ he swallowed, ‘is Rover. Only, ’ he said, keeping his voice steady with an effort, ‘I think he’s going . . . to die.’
Belladonna looked carefully at the worm. She did not think Rover was an odd name for an earthworm. She knew at once that he was called Rover because Terence dreadfully wanted a dog and knew he would never get one. And she knew too, that Terence was right. Rover was very, very sick.
‘May I hold him for a moment?’ she asked.
Terence hesitated. When somebody that belongs to you is going to die you feel you should hold on to him and help him right to the end. But when he saw the look on Belladonna’s face he carefully opened his hand and gave her his worm.
Belladonna bent over Rover and her hair fell like a golden curtain, inside which the wounded worm lay snug and warm. Then she began to croon a little song.
Terence had never heard a song like the one that Belladonna sang. It was about dampness and the soft darkness of the rich earth and about the patient worms who had turned it through the years. It was a song about pinkness and wetness and roundness, and while she sang it, Terence felt that he too, was an earthworm and understood the soul of all earthworms and always would. Then she blew three times on her cupped hands and parted them.
‘Let’s see now,’ she said.
‘Oh!’ said Terence. ‘Oh!’
The little jagged place where Matron’s shoe had hit the earthworm’s side was quite closed over. Rover’s skin was smooth again, there was no scar, and even as Terence gazed at him, Rover reared up his pointed end in just the jaunty way he used to do.