For a start, Mother Bloodwort never got into her caravan at all. Madame Olympia nabbed it straight away, no one knew how, and sat inside it with the aardvark, despising the other witches and refusing to take her turn at any of the chores. Nancy and Nora Shouter spent the first night quarrelling about which of them had the better camp bed and ended by sticking pen knives into each other’s lilos. Ethel Feedbag’s pig escaped from its pen and crashed into Mother Bloodwort’s tent, sending the old witch flying just as she was trying to fix a mouse-blood poultice under her nightdress, and Mabel Wrack insisted on using the cooking cauldron to give Doris a bubble bath which made the breakfast porridge taste very strange indeed.
It was Belladonna, of course, who was left to fetch the water and do the cooking and the washing-up, and however hard she tried to please everybody – braising cod’s eyes for Mabel Wrack and roasting squashed hedgehogs on hot bricks for Ethel Feedbag – she got nothing but grumbles and sneers for her pains.
And Belladonna had her own troubles. Mr Leadbetter and the orge were back in their old rooms up at the Hall and as Terence was supposed to be Mr Leadbetter’s nephew he had been given a little room beside the secretary’s in the servants’ wing. This meant that Rover too, was far away at the end of the long drive, sleeping in his wooden box under Terence’s window. And with her familiar out of reach, Belladonna’s old trouble was coming back, and coming back badly. T he very first morning she had woken to find that her sleeping-bag had come out in a rash of passion flowers – great, pollen-loaded things that tickled abominably and made her sneeze, and when she opened the flap of her tent she found six twitch-eared, bright-eyed baby rabbits waiting for her, their paws in the air.
‘I’m not a white witch now, you know,’ she said crossly. But of course she let them in and conjured up a patch of lettuce for them out of her groundsheet, and it was clear to everybody that they were to stay.
But if life was hard on the camping site in the West Meadow, it wasn’t exactly easy at the Hall. Mr Sniveller, the ghoul, who was sleeping in the Tapestry Room, found it difficult to break the habit of years and spent the night scooping fungus off the cellar walls and filching raw mince from the refrigerator and taking them to bed. This meant that he was usually very tired during the day and fell asleep all over the place, waking up suddenly to say things like, ‘Blood!’ or, ‘Slime!’ which made it difficult to carry on a sensible conversation. Poor Mr Chatterjee had caught a cold and sat inside his bottle sneezing miserably so that the glass misted up and he couldn’t see out. As for Arriman, well, as Lester said, ‘Anyone would think he was goin’ to have his bloomin’ head chopped off instead of getting hitched, the way he’s carrying on.’
In the bustle and fuss that led up to the start of the competition, Terence turned out to be worth his weight in gold. He ran errands, found the wizard’s socks, removed the bits of sticking plaster with scabs on them from Mr Sniveller’s bed and stuffed Mr Chatterjee’s bottle with paper tissue so that the little genie could blow his swollen nose. And everything he did, he did happily and with delight because Darkington, with its devilish maze and stinking laboratory and ghastly zoo seemed to him the most enchanting place in the whole world.
But what Terence did whenever he could be spared was to study Sir Simon Montpelier, and quite soon he knew as much about the wicked wife-slayer as Arriman himself. He learnt that the spectre usually appeared first in the broom cupboard, where he limbered up with a couple of groans, half a dozen eerie thumps and a wail or two, before settling into the serious business of smiting his forehead with a plashing sound. Then, still plashing for all he was worth, the unhappy phantom would set off through the laundry room, up the stairs to the library, pass through a couple of book cases and a stuffed bison, and end up in the Great Hall, popping out through a tapestry of a man being stuck full of arrows while being burnt at the stake, and ruining the appetite of whoever was at dinner.
‘You’ll see,’ said Terence to Belladonna, who was stirring the witches’ supper over the campfire. ‘He’ll be absolutely terrific when he’s raised. When you get close to him, his face is all sort of loathsome and ruined-looking. When he bursts through the wall, alive, it’ll be a sensation.’
‘Oh, Terence, I do hope so,’ said Belladonna. The baby rabbits hadn’t gone, nor had the passion flowers and the tree behind her tent was bearing golden pears. ‘Tell me,’ she went on, ‘how is He? Is he still so sad?’
She meant Arriman, of course. The great magician was seldom from her mind.
‘Well, he is a bit. But you’ve got to remember that he’s never seen you and that he doesn’t know you’re going to win.’
‘No,’ said Belladonna. ‘He certainly doesn’t know that.’
But already she felt blacker and more hopeful. It was always like that when Terence came.
And so, at last, after all the preparations and the fuss, the first day of the contest dawned.
Mabel Wrack – Witch Number One – had got up early and stood for two hours under the shower so that her legs did not dry out on her big day. She had dressed with care, fastening the sea slug brooch beneath her gown, but she was not nervous. Owing to Mrs Wrack having been a mermaid, Mabel was one-quarter fish and, as is well known, fishes are cold-blooded and never get excited.
As everyone had expected, Mabel had decided to do her trick beside the sea. The place she had chosen was called the Devil’s Cauldron: a sandy bay flanked by brooding granite cliffs and strewn with jagged rocks to which dark seaweed slimily clung.
Backing the sand was a strip of turf and it was here, at a trestle table which Lester had dragged out for them, that the judges sat. Arriman the Awful, wearing his robe with the constellations on it, was in the middle; Mr Chatterjee (inside his bottle on account of the nippy breeze) was on the magician’s left, and on the right – pale and exhausted after a night of hideous wandering – dropped Mr Sniveller. The other witches, gowned and masked so that Arriman couldn’t catch even an accidental glimpse of them, were huddled behind a clump of gorse bushes – all except Madame Olympia who had stayed snootily inside her caravan.
Arriman now got up to make a speech. He declared the Miss Witch of Todcaster contest open and welcomed all the competitors. He reminded them of the rules – any witch practising black magic on another witch or her familiars would be disqualified, the competitors must not show their faces and the judges’ decision was final. Then he sat down and Mr Leadbetter, shouting through a megaphone like a film director, said:
‘Witch Number One – step forward!’
There was clapping from the other witches, and from some villagers who had come up the cliff path, and Mabel emerged from behind the gorse bushes. Only the lower part of her face showed beneath the mask, but it was enough to make Arriman hope frantically that she was going to go to sea in a sieve and drown.
‘Present your list!’ ordered Mr Leadbetter, and Mabel went up to the judges’ table with her piece of paper. In the neat hand of a practised shopkeeper, Mabel had written:
1. One gong (loud)
2. Some golden rings
3. A drowned sailor
‘The Manager of the hotel was kind enough to lend us his gong,’ said Mr Leadbetter. ‘And we got the golden rings from Woolworths. But there is this matter of the drowned sailor.’
‘Hm,’ said Arriman, looking rather sick. There is a place called Davy Jones’s locker under the sea, where the bodies of drowned sailors are supposed to be kept, but he had never fancied it. Messy, it sounded, as though things would have been nibbled at, and, of all things, Arriman hated a mess.
Then he had an idea and smiled. ‘Hand me my wand, Leadbetter,’ he said, and shut his eyes. The next second a large grey skeleton stuck together with bits of wire swirled through the air and landed at the sea witch’s feet
‘I wanted a fresh one,’ complained Miss Wrack. ‘One with some meat on him. It’s for bait.’
‘If Witch Number One is not satisfied,’ snapped Arriman, fire shooting from his nost
rils, ‘she may withdraw from the contest.
‘Oh, all right,’ said Mabel sulkily. ‘ But he’s a very funny shape.’
This was certainly true. The skeleton had, in fact, belonged to the Biology Lab of a large Comprehensive School in the Midlands, and the poor gentleman hadn’t exactly been a sailor but an undertaker who liked messing about in boats and had fallen, in the year 1892, into the Shropshire Union Canal. Owing to the carelessness of the children, and the fact that the Biology master was the kind that couldn’t keep order, the skeleton had got badly jumbled. The skull was back to front, three finger bones were missing and for some reason he seemed to have had three thighs.
‘Announce the trick you will perform,’ Mr Leadbetter shouted through his megaphone.
Mabel Wrack turned to face the judges. She had taken Doris out of her bucket and thrown the familiar’s tentacles carelessly round her shoulders like a mink stole, while she held the animal’s round body under her arm, squeezing it for power and darkness like someone playing the bagpipes.
Then she spoke.
‘I SHALL CALL FORTH THE KRAKEN FROM THE DEEP,’ she said.
There was a stunned silence. The Kraken! That dread and dangerous monster that has lain since the dawn of time beneath the surface of the sea, dragging ships to their doom, creating by its lightest movement, tidal waves that could drown cities!
‘Oh, Terence,’ whispered Belladonna, ‘I’m scared, aren’t you? Fancy Mabel Wrack being able to do that!’
And indeed all the onlookers were a little bit ashamed. They had never taken the fishy witch too seriously and now . . .
Even Arriman the Awful was impressed. ‘Instruct Witch Number One to proceed,’ he said.
Mabel Wrack stepped forward to the edge of the ocean. The sea witch was no slouch and she had prepared her act with care. She would begin by peppering the sea with golden rings to fetch up the underwater spirits who were known to be extremely fond of jewellery and would then come and help her when she called them to her aid. As for the drowned sailor, he was meant to lure the Kraken from his lair and so make it easier for the spirits to find him.
She put Doris back in her bucket and threw the rings one by one into the foam. Then she raised her arms, and the skeleton of the undertaker who had liked messing about in boats rose slowly up in the air, turned a somersault and tumbled into the waves.
‘Levitation,’ said Arriman. ‘Quite neat. Give her a mark for that, don’t you think?’ The thought of seeing a Kraken had quite cheered him up.
Next, Mabel picked up the gong and thumped it with a resounding wallop, which sent the sea birds flying up in terror. Then:
‘Mighty Spirits of the Deep
Pray you waken from your sleep
Come as fast as you are able
Come and help your sister, Mabel,’
chanted Miss Wrack. She had decided to go into poetry for the contest. This may have been a mistake. Some witches have a feeling for poetry, s o me haven’t. Miss Wrack hadn’t.
‘From thunderous reef and mighty grot
The dreaded Kraken must be got . . .’
‘What’s a grot?’ whispered Mother Bloodwort pettishly from behind the gorse bushes.
‘It’s short for grotto, I think,’ Belladonna whispered back. ‘Sort of a cave.’ Though she knew that she had no chance of winning now – who could do anything more terrible than call up a Kraken – she was looking at Miss Wrack with shining eyes. There just wasn’t a mean streak anywhere in Belladonna.
The pause which followed was an anxious one. Even Arriman wondered if he had been hasty. Would there be flooding? Whirlpools? Cannibalism? There are too many stories of witches summoning up evil forces which they cannot then control.
The pause lengthened. The ghoul, unable to take the strain, dropped off to sleep, and still the wind soughed, and the grey sea foamed and boiled against the rocks.
But now there was a change. The sky seemed to darken. The white crests of the waves died away to leave a creeping, wrinkled skin of water. The wind dropped. The sea birds fell silent.
What came next was a strange heaping up of the water into a mound which grew and grew and became a huge tower topped with foam. And now the tower reared upwards, bent, and turned to race – a great tunnel of boiling, churning water – towards the shore.
The witches huddled together. Terence’s hand crept into Belladonna’s, and at the judges’ table, Arriman reached for the genie’s bottle and screwed on the top.
Just in time. The towering wave had landed with a thunderous crash upon the strand. And when the foam and turmoil had died down, the onlookers blinked.
Miss Wrack had called on the Spirits of the Deep to help her find the Kraken and it was perhaps natural that these should be mermaids. But the four ladies who now sat on the beach were fleshy and no longer young, and they seemed to be rather pointlessly clutching a large black handbag, each of them holding on to it with a pudgy arm. The rings which Miss Wrack had sent them glistened on their fingers, and their lower halves were sensibly covered in tail cosies of knitted bladderwrack, but all of them were topless and Arriman had already flinched and closed his eyes.
Miss Wrack stepped closer – and her mouth opened in horror.
‘Septic suckerfish!’ she swore under her breath.
And indeed it was the most appalling luck! Of all the mermaids in the ocean, she had managed to call up her mother’s four unmarried sisters: Aunt Edna, Aunt Gwendolyn, Aunt Phoebe and Aunt Jane!
For a moment, Mabel panicked. There is probably nothing less black or magical in the whole world than a person’s aunt. Then she remembered that the top half of her face was covered by a mask. With luck, she would not be recognized. There had been a bit of a split in the family when her mother had opted for legs. So, disguising her voice as well as she could, she began:
‘Summoned here, I bid thee hearken,
You have been to fetch the Kraken
Search the corners of the ocean—’
She broke off, trying to find a rhyme for ‘ocean’, and also wondering a bit whether an ocean really had corners. But she needn’t have bothered because all four of her aunts were talking at once, taking no notice of each other or of her.
‘My dear, we’re so glad you called! We’ve been worried sick!’
‘Not knowing what to do for the best, you see.’
‘When that oil rig went through his mother’s head—’
‘Skull shattered; not a hope, poor soul—’
‘It’s meant, I said to Edna, didn’t I, dear?’
‘You did, Phoebe. It’s meant, you said.’
‘Someone knows what’s right.’
The aunt who had just spoken broke off, edged closer, peered at Mabel Wrack. ‘Funny, I’d swear I’d seen you before. Those nostrils . . . that mouth . . .’
Still clutching their handbag, the mermaids waddled towards her on their tails.
‘It can’t be, of course. But isn’t she the spit of poor Agatha!’
‘The spit!’ echoed Aunt Jane.
Mabel Wrack retreated backwards, but it was too late.
‘It must be Agatha’s little girl. The one she had with the fishmonger after the operation. It is her, I’m sure. Mabel, wasn’t she called?’
‘Mabel! Dear little Mabel!’
Terribly excited, the aunts dropped their handbag at last and surrounded their niece with a great flopping of tails and waving of pink, plump arms.
‘Stop it!’ hissed Mabel furiously. ‘ This is a competition. Keep away! And speak in verse, you’re disgracing me.’
There was a moment of outraged silence while Mabel continued to glare angrily at her relations. It was a silly thing for her to do. Mermaids are famous for being touchy, And so, of course, are maiden aunts.
‘Oh, very well,’ said Aunt Edna haughtily. ‘ We know when we aren’t wanted, don’t we?’
‘It was you that called us, you know.’
‘Such airs – just because her father had legs and a s
hop.’
As they spoke, the mermaids began to waddle huffily away, speaking over their shoulders as they went.
‘We were going to stay and give you a few hints, but we won’t bother now.’
‘Don’t blame us if you don’t know how much sieved sea quirt to give.’
‘Speak in verse, indeed!’
And with a last, offended sniff, the four mermaids dived back into the water and were gone.
‘Stop!’ shouted the desperate Miss Wrack. ‘Come back! You’ve left your handbag!’
It was a dreadful moment. The mermaids had gone, the mighty Kraken still slumbered beneath the deep, and on the face of Arriman the Awful there was a look that froze the marrow in one’s bones.
And now this handbag . . .
Only, was it a handbag? For even as they watched, the object on the sand seemed to give a kind of judder. Next it puffed itself out into a round, smoothed dome like the top of a tadpole or of a small and very squidgy flying saucer. In the middle of this dome two slits now appeared and a pair of shining, tear-filled, sky-blue eyes stared upwards at Miss Wrack.
‘Oh, my Gawd,’ said Lester, with whom the penny had already dropped.
The thing now went into a kind of private struggle and from its round, dark blancmange of a body there appeared, one by one, eight wavery, wobbly legs each ending in a blob-shaped foot. Peering closer, the onlookers could see, at the rim of the saucer, a round hole from whose reddened edges the little finger bone of the undertaker sadly hung. Aunt Jane had given it to him to help him with his teething.
Even with the evidence there before their eyes, no one could quite believe it. They watched in silence as the ‘handbag’ raised itself once more, tottered a few pathetic steps and fell in a despairing, quivering heap before Miss Wrack.