‘Mummy?’ it said in a piteous voice. ‘Mummy?’
The sea witch stepped back in disgust. Terence clung tightly to Belladonna to stop her running forward, the ghoul woke suddenly and said, ‘Spittle!’ and Arriman the Awful rose from his seat.
‘What in the name of devilry and darkness is that THING?’ he thundered.
He knew, of course. You could say a lot about Arriman, but not that he was thick.
‘That, sir,’ said the ogre, ‘is a Kraken. A baby Kraken. A very young baby Kraken indeed.’
Hearing voices, feeling himself unwanted by the very witch who had called him from the sea, the Kraken, his eyes, his whole body streaming with tears, now began to totter wetly to the table where the judges sat. Three times he fell, his legs hopelessly knotted, and three times he rose again, leaving each time a glistening pool of water, until he reached the chair of Arriman the Awful, Wizard of the North.
‘Daddy?’ said the Kraken, rolling his anguished eyes upwards. And again, ‘Daddy?’
Everybody waited.
Arriman looked downwards and shuddered. ‘Take it away, Lester. Remove it. Throw it back into the sea.’
The orge did not move.
‘You heard me, Lester. It is dribbling on my feet.’
‘Sir,’ said the ogre. ‘That Kraken is an orphan. Its mother’s had an oil rig through her head. It’ll be two thousand years before that Kraken is old enough to swallow as much as a canoe. If you throw it back now, it’ll die.’
‘So?’ said Arriman nastily.
Over by the gorse bushes, Belladonna closed her eyes and prayed. Mr Chatterjee tried to swoosh out of his bottle, hit his head on the screwed-on-top and fell back, his turban over his dark, kind face.
‘Daddy?’ said the Kraken, his voice only a whisper now – and raised from the top of his body, a tiny, trembling and hopeless-looking tail.
‘Oh, a plague on the lot of you,’ cursed Arriman, and scooping up the Kraken, which immediately began to squeak and giggle because it was extremely ticklish, the furious magician left the judges’ table and strode away towards the Hall.
Nine
Mabel’s marks were announced that night. She had scored four out of a possible ten – a low mark and one that would have been lower if Arriman had had his way. But as kind Mr Chatterjee pointed out, she had called up the Kraken from the Deep and it wasn’t her fault that the thing had turned out the way it had.
The low score pleased all the other witches, and Ethel Feedbag, whose turn came on the following day, was heard lurching and roistering round the camp fire until long after midnight, hiccupping over her parsnip wine and falling asleep with her head on her pig and her wellies dangerously close to the embers. Belladonna, of course, couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for Mabel, who had retired huffily into her sleeping bag with wet towels round her legs, but Terence didn’t pretend to be anything but pleased.
‘You’ll see, Belladonna, you’ll win; you’re bound to!’
He had brought Rover down earlier, and just by touching the slender, peaceful body of her familiar, Belladonna had been able to turn the passion flowers into bloodshot eyeballs and the golden pears into thumbscrews. She’d left the baby rabbits because, as she said to Terence, it was knowing that she could turn them into decayed appendixes that was important.
‘How is . . . you know . . . He?’ she asked now.
Terence said that Arriman was a little bit upset. He could have said more, but he knew that Belladonna was in love and that nothing hurts people more than to think that someone they love is not altogether perfect. In fact, Arriman had been creating like nobody’s business on account of the Kraken. Absolutely nothing could persuade the Kraken that Arriman was not his father and the magician had had to change his shoes three times between tea and supper because the thing insisted on sitting on his feet. Krakens make their own wetness from the inside and can breathe in air as well as in water so there was nothing to stop the dreaded Denizen of the Deep from trying to climb on to Arriman’s lap or shedding tears all over his trousers, and the Great Man was taking it very badly.
‘Oh, why didn’t the New Wizard Cometh!’ he raged at dinner. ‘I’d have been spared all this. Lester, take it away!’
‘It’s you he wants, sir,’ said the ogre reproachfully. But he scooped the Kraken up and put him in a soup tureen, for what with Sir Simon wailing in the wainscot, Mr Chatterjee sneezing in his bottle and the ghoul dribbling raw liver from his mouth, he did feel that perhaps his master had had enough.
The following morning they were up early to see what Witch Number Two was going to do.
Ethel had chosen to perform her trick in a grassy and very beautiful hollow in which, beside a bubbling brook, there grew an oak, an ash and a thorn.
These three trees have, since the beginning of time, been special trees. Even separately they are special but when they grow together . . . well, anything can happen in a place like that.
‘Witch Number Two – step forward!’ shouted Mr Leadbetter, and Ethel, still wearing beneath her gown the three mouldering jerseys she’d slept in, lurched out from behind a rock, pushing a wheelbarrow and calling to her huge and mucky pig.
‘Hand in your list!’ Mr Leadbetter ordered, and Ethel walked over to the judges’ table, which Lester had set out on a level patch of grass, and put down a crumbled piece of paper in front of Arriman.
The magician read it and passed a weary hand across his forehead. Witch Number Two wanted: A man, a woman and a child.
‘More fuss,’ he murmured. And then, ‘Fetch the telephone directory. ’
So Terence ran up to the Hall and came back with the Todcaster and District Directory, And Arriman closed his eyes, flicked the pages, and stubbed his finger down on what turned out to be the B’s.
It is not difficult to work a telephone directory. Any wizard worth his salt can do it. You just press your finger down hard on a telephone number, say the right spells and immediately you can see in your mind’s eye the family that lives at that address. After that, summoning them by levitation is just child’s play. So now Arriman ignored a Colonel Bellingbotter sitting pinkly in his bath at Todcaster 5930, passed over the Brisket sisters doing Keep Fit exercise at 2378 and found in the Bicknell family at Todcaster 9549, exactly what he was looking for.
Mr and Mrs Bicknell and their daughter, Linda, were sitting at breakfast in their small semi at 187 Acacia Avenue. Mrs Bicknell was still in her hairnet and curlers, Linda was dressed for school. Linda was fat and her mother was thin; Linda was eight years old and her mother was thirty-five, but what they both liked best was being nasty to Linda’s father, Mr Bicknell, and they were doing it now.
‘Why did you put on that stupid shirt?’ said Mrs Bicknell. ‘It makes you look like an ostrich with the croup.’
‘Your hair’s getting awfully thin on top, Daddy! You’ll be bald soon. Won’t you look silly when you’re bald,’ said Linda.
‘Mrs Pearce across the road is getting a new washing machine. I suppose you know I’ve had my washing machine for three years?’
‘Davina’s daddy’s buying her a doll that can clean her own teeth. Why don’t you buy me a doll like that?’
Mr Bicknell, a small, rather stooped man with a thin, tired face and a lined forehead, just went on quietly eating his cornflakes. He worked hard all day in his grocer’s shop helping the people he served to make their money go further and when he came home at night he went on helping. He helped his wife with the washing up and fixed shelves and dug the garden, but whatever he did, it made no difference. His wife and his daughter just nagged and nagged and nagged.
‘You didn’t clean the budgerigar out properly, ’ s a id Mrs Bicknell, piling her toast with marmalade. ‘There’s bird seed stuck to the corner of his cage.’
‘Davina says being a grocer is silly. Only silly people are grocers, Davina says.’
‘And I wish that just for once you’d—’
But at this point the windows began to rattl
e violently. Then they burst open and the room was filled with a whirling, roaring wind which lifted Mr and Mrs Bicknell and their daughter, Linda, and sent them up and out of the house . . . up and away . . . to land, in what seemed to be just a moment in time, at Ethel Feedbag’s feet.
The country witch peered down at them and nodded. Then she stuck her boot under the shrieking, twitching Mrs Bicknell and the howling, kicking Linda and turned them over on their backs. There was no need to turn over Mr Bicknell who already lay quietly, looking upwards at the sky.
‘Announce your trick!’ commanded Mr Leadbetter through his megaphone.
Ethel took the straw from her mouth, burped, and said:
‘I BE GOIN’ TO SHUT THE WOMAN IN THE ASH TREE AN’ THE MAN IN THE OAK TREE AN’ THAT BAWLIN’ BRATINTHE THORN TREE.’
A whisper passed through the audience and they looked at Witch Number Two with a new respect. Imprisonment of human beings in trees is very old magic and it is as black as night. The Druids did it, and the witches of Ancient Greece and Rome. Even now there are gaunt willows and shuddering alders from whose insides their own spirits have fled, to be replaced by some boastful traveller or careless shepherd who has lain there trapped in slumber for a thousand years.
Only Belladonna, hiding with the other witches, was unhappy. ‘Those poor trees!’ she murmured.
And indeed the trees were worth worrying about. The oak was one of those trees that are a whole world of their own: its great scarred trunk was full of clefts and hollows in which squirrels lived, and mice and little scurrying beetles. It stood rooted in a pool of soft green moss; delicate acorn cups clung to its mazed branches and its crown was a mass of autumn gold.
The ash was as tall, but slender, the smooth grey bark seemingly like silver against the pale blue sky, the keys hanging in bunches from its upward-sweeping boughs. A younger tree than the oak, but proud and regal as a queen.
And lastly, t he hawthorn, a most powerful and knowing tree with its writhing trunk, its blood-red berries clustered round the fierce black barbs.
Ethel Feedbag, meanwhile, had fetched a sack from her wheelbarrow and humped it to where the Bicknells lay. It was labelled Mangel Wurzel Meal, but it was better not to ask what was really in the powder she now sprinkled over the bawling, slug-faced Linda, her twitching mother and the tired body of the grocer. Whatever it was, within seconds all three of them lay unconscious on the grass.
Grinning happily, Ethel now pulled up her gown, fumbled under her skirt, and from the elastic of her brown woollen knickers, drew a long black-hilted witches’ knife. And as she did so, Arriman gasped and turned a chalky white. He had seen, clear as daylight, the dreaded wellies beneath the gown.
For a moment, it looked as though the great magician would cut and run. But the ogre and the secretary had already closed ranks behind him, and with a groan he sank back in his seat.
Ethel, meanwhile, was smearing the bark of the thorn tree with a slimy blood-coloured paste. Then she picked up her knife and made a single, long slit in its side.
‘Oh, Terence, I can’t bear it!’ whispered Belladonna.
‘I don’t suppose it feels any pain, Belladonna. I expect that’s what the ointment was for. To stop it hurting.’
They watched breathlessly as the slit, of its own accord, grew wider . . . wider . . . and became, at last, a gaping hole which led to the tree’s very heart.
‘Not bad,’ said Arriman, struggling to be fair. ‘Though I prefer lightning myself. Neater.’
Ethel grunted, whacked her pig and came back to stand with her knife poised over Linda.
‘Is she going to kill her?’ asked Terence hopefully.
But Ethel was crouching over Linda, murmuring a spell in a language so ancient and peculiar that none of them could make out a word. Over and over again she chanted, and then slowly the fat, nasty little schoolgirl rose from the grass, stuck her hands in front of her and began to sleepwalk, like a bewitched suet pudding, towards the tree.
‘In!’ ordered Ethel, putting a boot in Linda’s bottom.
And, lo and behold, Linda wobbled forward into the thorn tree and the sides of the tree came together closer . . . closer . . . and the slit vanished and she was gone.
Next, Ethel went over to the ash. Again she rubbed the tree with ointment, again she made a slit in its side and again the slit widened to show the dark centre of the tree. And now it was Mrs Bicknell who rose and walked in a trance into the tree and the tree closed round her, and she was gone.
Ethel was just going to start the oak when there was an extremely angry rustling noise which began at the hawthorn tree and moved over to where Ethel stood. A second, even angrier rustle, followed. What these were, were the Spirits of the Thorn and of the Ash, and they were in a very nasty temper indeed.
‘It is not at all convenient for me to be out this morning,’ said the Spirit of the Ash.
‘You might have asked,’ said the Spirit of the Thorn.
One cannot actually see tree spirits – they are simply a rustle – but one knows that if one could, they would be green, female and easily upset.
‘Didn’t ask you to shift,’ said Ethel. ‘Plenty of room for everybody. ’
‘Stay in with that repulsive child!’ said the Spirit of the Thorn. ‘You must be joking! I’m going home to Mother.’ And she rustled off in the direction of an old hawthorn standing on the hill, followed by the Spirit of the Ash, still yammering with indignation.
Ethel shrugged. It took more than a couple of rustles to upset a Feedbag. She had made a slit in the oak tree now and stood back as it opened, groaning and creaking and sending the squirrels and dormice scampering away in terror.
Then Ethel went to fetch Mr Bicknell and he too, got up and walked into the tree and the tree closed over him and he was gone.
The judges, going over to have a closer look, were pleased. True, the thorn tree bulged at the bottom because of the fatness of Linda’s thighs, and its bark had come out in bumpy knots like boils. The golden leaves of the ash too, were shrivelling fast. Still, no passer-by could possibly have guessed that three frantic, tortured human beings were imprisoned in this peaceful dell.
But of course there was no question of giving out marks just yet. A true witch must be able to loosen an enchantment as well as weave it.
‘Undo the spell!’ ordered Arriman.
Ethel had slumped down beside her pig. Now she got up and waddled over to the thorn. Again she made a slit in the tree, again the slit widened – and out on the grass like a crumpled maggot, rolled Linda Bicknell.
Next, Ethel slit open the ash and the lovely tree seemed to sigh with relief as Mrs Bicknell, sticky with sap and minus three of her curlers, fell out on to the turf.
Smirking now, Ethel went over to the oak. Again she slit it, again she stood back and waited.
Nothing happened.
‘Out!’ ordered Ethel, jerking her head.
Still nothing.
Beneath the mask, Ethel’s round face flushed with temper.
‘Out!’ she said, stamping her foot. Silence. Then, from the depths of the great tree, a quiet voice said, ‘No!’
Ethel’s face darkened to beetroot. ‘It’s over,’ she hissed. ‘You come on out!’
But inside the oak tree, the tired grocer did not stir. What did come out of the tree was its spirit. Like the Spirits of the Ash and of the Thorn, the Spirit of the Oak was simply a rustle but an older and a wiser one.
‘Leave him be,’ it said to Ethel Feedbag. ‘He wants to stay. He likes it in there. Says he’ll come out when his wife’s ninety and in a wheelchair and can’t nag, and his daughter’s left home for good.’
‘Stay in t’ tree?’ roared Ethel, angry as a bull.
‘That’s right,’ rustled the Spirit. ‘Says he’s never been so happy in his life. He’s no bother to me, he just wants to sleep most of the time. His wife used to snore and kick him round the bed, you know how some women do. I don’t mind him, he’s company – and you can
see He doesn’t mind.’
This was true. Unlike the thorn which had come out in boils, or the ash whose leaves had shrivelled, the great oak tree stood calm and undisturbed by the grocer in his depths.
‘Just do us up again, dear,’ ordered the Spirit. ‘It’s getting draughty. He’ll be all right in there for fifty years or so; I’ll see he doesn’t go mouldy. Then someone can let him out and the poor bloke can lead a decent life.’
So Ethel closed the tree up again. What else could she do? But when Linda and her mother had been sent back to Acacia Avenue and Ethel’s marks came through, they were low; four out of ten, the same as Mabel’s. What else could one expect? There is nothing black about shutting someone into a tree who simply loves it there.
But if Ethel was furious, Arriman was as happy as a sandboy. Whatever else happened, he wouldn’t have to marry the witch with the wellies. All through supper he laughed and joked – until he went upstairs, heard the steady drip-drip of water, and found that the Kraken had climbed on to his bed.
Ten
No one ever forgot what happened when Witch Number Three did her trick. It was really very horrible in a way that no one could have imagined, and even Arriman, used as he was to terror and disaster, could never think of it, in years to come, without feeling quite giddy and faint.
Witch Number Three was Nancy Shouter and when she announced her trick there was a great deal of interest.
‘I AM GOING,’ she said, ‘TO MAKE A BOTTOMLESS HOLE.’
To make a bottomless hole is not easy. A bottomless hole is not a hole that comes out in Australia; a hole that comes out in Australia is a hole that comes out in Australia – it is not bottomless. No, bottomless is something very different. Bottomlessness is a mysterious nothingness that goes on for ever, it is an interminable blackness, it is no echo, no plop when something drops into it, no glimmer of water in its depths. Not only that; a bottomless hole has a demonic and unusual power – anyone coming too close has an almost uncontrollable longing to throw himself into it.