Everyone, therefore, was pleased and Mr Chatterjee, becoming muddled in his excitement, said, ‘Oh, that is good! A bottom with no hole!’
So Nancy got to work. She had chosen the East Lawn, quite close to the house, to do her trick and she went about it in a business-like manner, stubbing out her fag, putting her chicken down on the bonnet of the caterpillar tractor that Mr Leadbetter had hired for her and setting the motor in motion so that the heavy rotary blades could dig into the soil.
It was a mild and pleasant day. The other witches were clustered in the little summer house where they could see without being seen by Arriman. Even Madame Olympia had turned out with her aardvark. At the judges’ table, which Lester had raised on wooden blocks so that they could see the digging better, Arriman tried to forget the awful night he’d spent with the Kraken, and his anxiety about the Wizard Watcher (who was sending brave but homesick postcards from places like Brighton and Southend-on-Sea) and prepared to give Witch Number Three a chance.
Nancy certainly seemed to know her job. True, her chicken was against her. All along, the Shouter chickens had been rather a wash-out as familiars. They never crowed thrice or flapped threateningly or erected their wattles, and altogether they looked more like old age pensioners evicted from a battery than the kind of bird one finds in fairy stories or in fights.
All the same, Nancy was doing all right. From working with the railway, both the Shouter twins were good with mechanical things, and after about an hour Nancy drove the tractor away to the other side of the lawn and the real task began.
Because, of course, at this stage the thing was simply a hole. Nancy had dug up some old drainpipes, part of a tin bath, an old ham bone of the Wizard Watcher’s and masses and masses of shale and sludge. She had made a deep hole, a good hole, the kind of hole little boys stand and gape at on the way to school, but though its bottom was a long way down, it was still there.
But now the magic began. First Nancy circled the hole with her wand, scratching a witches’ pentacle deep into the surrounding soil. Five times she walked widdershins round the hole and five times she walked not widdershins, keeping always to the far side of the magic symbol. Then she put down her wand, picked up her chicken, and raising it aloft, turned to the north.
‘Spirits of the Earth, I bid thee SUCK THE BOTTOM FROM THIS HOLE!’ she intoned.
Then, still holding her chicken, she turned to the west: ‘Spirits of Fire, I bid thee BURN THE BOTTOM FROM THIS HOLE!’ cried Nancy Shouter.
Then she turned to the east and bade the Spirits of the Air BLOW THE BOTTOM FROM THE HOLE. But now, the chicken had had enough. It fluttered, squawking, from her arms and it was chicken-less that Nancy turned to the south and commanded the Spirits of the Water to DROWN THE BOTTOM OF THE HOLE.
After which she said the Lord’s Prayer backwards – and the spell was complete.
It is always hard, the bit between the end of a piece of magic and the time when it is supposed to work. No one is good at waiting, and witches least of all. Nancy had begun most irritably to tap her toes when the scream began.
It was a scream such as no one could have imagined. A scream as if a million giants were being disembowelled with red-hot pincers – a scream that grew louder and more unendurable each second, till everyone present thought that their skulls must shatter with the pain of it.
And how could it be otherwise? For this was the scream of a hole losing the only thing it has – its bottom.
When the noise had died away at last and the pain in their ears had gone, the judges walked over to where Nancy stood. Taking care not to go too close because of the fearsome power a bottomless hole has to draw things into it, they examined, discussed and considered.
And they were pleased. Arriman was nodding, Mr Chatterjee, in his bright turban, was bobbing up and down, and the white exhausted face of the old ghoul had cracked into something almost like a smile.
For while it is true that there is not much you can actually do with a bottomless hole, at least it cannot possibly turn out to be someone’s aunt like the mermaids, nor can it make anybody happy as Mr Bicknell had been made happy by being shut into a tree. As they returned to the table, it was clear that the judges were going to give Nancy a much higher mark than they had awarded to Ethel Feedbag or Mabel Wrack.
But before they could make an announcement there was a scuffle from the summer house, Belladonna cried: ‘Oh, please, don’t!’ – and then Nora Shouter, shaking herself loose, catapulated on to the East Lawn, brandishing her chicken as she came.
‘You’re a cheat!’ she screamed, charging up to her twin. ‘You’re a liar and a twister and a cheat! That’s my chicken you’ve got there! You’ve done your trick with my chicken so it doesn’t count.’
‘I have not done my trick with your chicken! I have done my trick with my chicken!’
‘You haven’t!’
‘You have!’
Face to face on the East Lawn, the Shouter sisters’ fury and loathing reached new heights.
‘And anyway,’ yelled Nora, ‘I don’t believe your hole is bottomless. It’s just a hole!’
‘My hole is so bottomless!’
‘No, it isn’t!’
‘Yes, it is!’
Arriman had risen from his seat, his devilish eyebrows meeting in an angry frown, and in the summer house, Belladonna covered her face. But nothing could stop the Shouters now. Both had put down their chickens and stood facing each other with murder in their eyes.
‘If you say my hole isn’t bottomless once more, I’ll finish you, you worm-eaten faggot,’ screamed Nancy, forgetting the contest, forgetting everything.
‘It isn’t bottomless! It isn’t bottomless! It isn’t bottomless!’ screamed Nora, quite eaten up with jealousy and temper.
What happened next, happened with terrifying speed.
Nancy stepped forward and pushed her sister hard, sending her reeling, to fall backwards with her legs in the air. Then, as Nora tried to rise, Nancy pushed her again and she fell, this time inside the magic pentacle.
Even then, Nancy might have saved her twin. But she stood there, unmoving, her face suffused with an evil, gloating triumph as Nora half rose, swayed – and tottered, of her own accord, towards the round, black maw . . .
Right at the edge, she managed to pause, and tried desperately to take a step backwards. Too late! There was a hideous, roaring, sucking noise, Nora’s arm went up . . .
And then the hole took her and she was gone.
The campsite, that night, was silent as the grave. Arriman, white with shock, had disqualified Witch Number Three and ordered the East Lawn to be cleared. Nancy, t hough, had hardly seemed to hear what he said, but just stood there, blindly gazing at the spot where her sister had last stood, and in the end it was Belladonna who led her away and put her to bed in the tent she had shared with Nora.
‘Doesn’t matter which of our chickens is which now, does it?’ was all Nancy said as Belladonna settled the sad brown birds into their coops.
And Belladonna, who knew perfectly well which chicken was which, and always had, agreed that it didn’t matter now. It didn’t matter at all.
The horribleness of what had happened kept everyone in a state of shock throughout the following day, which was the one on which Nora should have done her act. Mr Chatterjee stayed curled in his bottle like a baby that doesn’t want to be born, Arriman didn’t even notice when the Kraken dribbled into his best elastic-sided boots, and at the campsite the witches stopped bickering for once, shamed by the tragedy that had overtaken them.
But the strangest thing of all was what had happened to Nancy.
Nancy had turned overnight from a loud-mouthed, bossy, chain-smoking witch into a timid, shrunken person who just lay on her camp bed in her vest and knickers refusing to wash or dress or eat, and telling anyone who came near that it didn’t matter which chicken was which.
‘She’s going off her nut, you mark my words,’ said Mother Bloodwort. ‘I’ve seen it b
efore. She’s flipped.’
Terence couldn’t understand it. ‘She hated Nora so much, didn’t she, Belladonna? So why is she so upset?’
Belladonna crinkled her forehead, trying to work it out.
‘I suppose . . . hating Nora was sort of a part of Nancy. I mean, it was what being Nancy was about. And now Nora’s gone, she isn’t anybody. Just a wraith.’
But however worried they were about Nancy, the contest had to go on. So later that afternoon, Terence and Belladonna set off for the woods behind the campsite and practised with Rover, turning the golden bracken fronds into leprous fingers and conjuring little spitting dragons from a bramble bush. They had discovered that Rover’s power was so strong that it could work from inside the matchbox even when Terence held it closed, and this was a great help because with the box open, Rover had wandered about rather a lot.
‘Funny, I thought I heard someone moving over there, behind those elms,’ said Belladonna, as they sat resting in a grassy clearing, letting Rover crawl confidingly across their hands.
They peered through the trees, but there was no one there. Yet both of them had had an eerie feeling of being watched, and by someone far more sinister than lumbering Ethel or fishy Mabel Wrack.
‘Perhaps we’d better put him away,’ said Terence, scooping Rover back into his box. They had kept his incredible power secret from the other witches and they meant to go on doing so.
And if they could not see the cunning enchantress loping away from the clearing, who could blame them? She had taken on a form much used by witches: that of a fleet and silent hare. But no real hare ever had in its eyes the look that was in this one’s: evil and calculating and unutterably cruel.
Eleven
The following day it was Mother Bloodwort’s turn. She had spent the whole of the evening before in a last desperate attempt at the turning-herself-young-again spell, rushing from her tent to the toilet block and back again with little jars of crushed gall bladder from the inside of murderers, powdered mandrake picked under a dying moon and a whole lot of other noxious things which she rubbed into herself, croaking weird rhymes as she did so.
But it hadn’t helped. As she was announced by Mr Leadbetter and tottered out into the Italian Garden, she was unmistakably Mother Bloodwort, warts, whiskers, Cloud of Flies and all.
Arriman of course, recognized her at once. But to the surprise of Mr Leadbetter and the ogre, he did not try to escape. The reason for this was simple. He had decided that if the witch with the whiskers won the contest, he, Arriman the Awful, would kill himself. He would do this in some very dramatic way, perhaps by plunging over the cliff into the boiling waters of the Devil’s Cauldron, or by shooting himself with a silver duelling pistol or by falling onto one of the swords that Lester was always swallowing, but he would do it.
So he was quite calm as Witch Number Five hobbled towards him and handed in her list, and he stayed calm until he’d read it.
It was Mother Bloodwort who wanted the seven princesses. She was going to do an old-fashioned trick, but a very famous one: the one in which seven beautiful maidens of the Blood Royal turn into seven black swans, doomed to wing their way across the waters of the world through all eternity.
There is probably nothing sadder or more romantic in all magic than this spell. One minute you have these lively bright-eyed girls with all life before them, and often a prince or two in the offing – and then there comes this ghastly moment when their golden hair turns into black down, their rose-bud mouths become beaks, their pretty feet in silver slippers change into webbed toes . . . until at last the great black tragic birds fly away into the sunset never to return.
As a setting for this trick, Mother Bloodwort had chosen the Italian Garden which lay beside the lake.
Arriman hadn’t got round to much blighting and smiting there and it was a beautiful spot with urns, statues and wide gravelled paths which swept down to the shimmering water.
But now the great magician had read her list. ‘Seven princesses!’ he roared. ‘Seven! You must be mad!’
Mother Bloodwort, however, was not to be put off.
‘Aye. Seven. Proper ones. Royal.’
‘I can’t just whirl princesses through the air like commoners, you know,’ said Arriman. ‘The thing has to be done properly. Decent transport and all that. And they’re not in the telephone directory. ’
But Mother Bloodwort, obstinate old witch that she was, just stood there, waiting.
Arriman sighed. ‘Tell everyone to go away for an hour, Leadbetter,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to go to my laboratory for this. And send me that nephew of yours. He’s a useful lad and I could do with an extra pair of hands.’
So Mr Leadbetter took the witches back to the camp, and Terence, beaming with pride, followed Arriman and the ogre into the laboratory with its bubbling crucibles and fiendish flasks.
‘Actually there is a sort of telephone directory for princesses,’ said the magician. ‘It’s called the Almanach de Gotha. Run and get it from the library, boy. It’s a big, gold-bound book on the second shelf as you go in.’
Terence was back in no time, his eyes shining with excitement.
‘Hm,’ said Arriman. ‘Let’s see. There’s a Spanish family descended from Carlos the Cruel, I believe. Yes . . . good, there seems to be a daughter. And we ought to find something in Germany. What about the Hohenstifterbluts – they’re royal enough.’
‘Can’t we have a British princess?’ said Lester.
Arriman shook his head. ‘Not wise, I think.’ He continued to flick the pages. ‘We shall have to scrape the barrel a bit. Still, let’s get to work.’
For nearly an hour, Arriman magicked: murmuring spells, twirling his wand, going backwards and forwards between his potions and his vellum-bound books. Once he said, ‘Strange, I feel an unusual force in this room. Things are coming through much faster than usual.’ But though Terence exchanged a look with Lester, he said nothing. Rover was in his pocket, but if Belladonna was to win the contest, the worm’s special power had to be kept a secret.
‘Right,’ said the magician. ‘You can fetch them all back now. The last one’s just come through.’
Because, sure enough, there, rather beautifully arranged round the rim of a fountain, were seven princesses. Arriman had kept his word and all of them were of the Blood Royal, but that was as far as he’d been able to go. It was no use pretending that they were a matching set of lovely girls. The Princesses Olga Zerchinsky, for example, a niece of one of the last Grand Dukes of Russia, was ninety-two and crippled with rheumatism so that Arriman had had to conjure her up in a wheelchair. On the other hand, the tiny black African princess, descended from King Solomon himself, was lying asleep in her carved ebony cradle. The Spanish princess, though beautifully dressed in a lace mantilla and low cut gown, unfortunately had a wooden leg and the Red Indian princess was almost invisible in a cloud of smoke from her pipe of peace. There was a young princess from America wearing Levis and a T-shirt emblazoned with I AM BATMAN’S FRIEND (her ancestors had left France when Louis Phillipe lost his throne), and there was a middle-aged Austrian one whose nose came down over her chin because she was a Habsburg and they have been famous through history for being the ugliest rulers in the world. And there was an Eastern princess in silken trousers who had Mr Chatterjee swooshing out of his bottle with excitement.
Mother Bloodwort, meanwhile, had announced her trick.
‘I AM GOING TO TURN SEVEN PRINCESSES OF THE BLOOD ROYAL INTO SEVEN BLACK SWANS,’ she said. Then, feeling perhaps that something was missing, she added, ‘TEE HEE,’ which was the nearest she could get to evil, cackling laughter.
She then vanished behind a statue of the god, Pan, and returned with a broomstick. It was the crummiest, most moth-eaten broomstick anyone had ever seen – Mother Bloodwort had made it herself from brushwood she had found at the back of the camping site – but everyone was pleased because it meant she was going to do hobby horse magic. This is the kind where you ride
round and round your victims going faster and ever faster, dizzying them with your speed and your spells, until the transformation is complete. It is old-fashioned magic, but it can be very powerful.
So now Mother Bloodwort went over to the fountain, blew a hole in her Cloud of Flies and stood peering at the princesses. Then she laid her wrinkled hand on the Spanish one in her lace mantilla and turquoise gown.
‘You!’ she said, pulling her forward on to the gravelled path.
Arriman had hypnotised the princesses as they came so that the black-eyed Princess Juanita followed the old crone obediently, her wooden leg clacking a little as she walked.
Mother Bloodwort now mounted her broomstick, groaning as she heaved her stiff old legs over the handle, which she had greased with the melted body-fat of maddened skunks, and began to ride round and round the royal Spanish lady.
“Hattock away, ye magic broom
Send this princess to her doom!’
shrieked Mother Bloodwort.
Faster she rode, and faster, sending her hood tumbling back and her white hair screaming, while her Cloud of Flies clung desperately to her flushed face and heaving chest.
So crazy did she look, so exhausted and old, that no one really expected the magic to work. But they were wrong. Strange and terrible things were happening to the Princess Juanita.
Her mantilla had wavered . . . vanished . . . Her head was shimmering . . . and now it was covered in feathers, and her full, pouting mouth was changing . . . yes, changing into a beak!
‘She’s done it, Terence! Mother Bloodwort’s done it!’ cried Belladonna joyfully from the pavilion.
Once more, Mother Bloodwort circled the doomed princess. Then she dismounted and stood back.
‘Drat!’ said Mother Bloodwort.
For while it was true that she had completely transformed the princess into a bird, that bird was not a swan. It was a duck. Furthermore, the princess having had this trouble with her leg, it was a lame duck.
Everybody stared gloomily at the enchanted bird as it waddled, quacking, towards the water. Why there is such a difference between a duck and a swan it is hard to say. There just is. This one seemed to be a Khaki Campbell and not to be at all the sort of person that a prince might fall in love with, recognizing it for the imprisoned soul it was.