The Darke Toad

  Alther Mella had told her that DomDaniel had drowned in the Marram Marshes when his ship, the Vengeance, had sunk some six months ago. Even Alice, who was not much interested in ghosts (apart from Alther) knew enough about things ghostly to understand that this could not be DomDaniel’s ghost, for a ghost must stay in the place where it entered ghosthood for a year and a day. And so any ghost of DomDaniel would still be languishing deep in Marsh mud—and serves it right too, she thought. Besides, wind did not snatch at ghostly cloaks; it blew right through them. The only answer was that somehow DomDaniel had survived the loss of his ship. And now, here he was, back in the Port.

  Shaking, Alice got to her feet. She hurried out of her office, across the empty hallway and up the stairs, glancing over her shoulder just in case, somehow, DomDaniel had gotten inside. When Alice reached the upstairs galleried landing, she broke into a run and did not stop until she came to the double doors that led to the guest suite.

  Alice paused, suddenly unwilling to disturb Marcia. Suppose she had made a mistake. Suppose it really was just some Hallowseeth reveler. “Come on, Alice,” she told herself firmly. “You know it was him. And Marcia has to know too. Now. Before something awful happens.”

  And so Alice, never one to do things by halves, took her Customs House gavel out of her pocket and thumped Marcia’s door. Hard.

  8

  INVISIBLE

  Marcia was on the Port Barge. A shark was slamming against the side, and only she knew why—it was trying to get to Septimus and eat him.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Septimus, who was sleeping in the box room near the door, leaped out of bed and stood at attention with the familiar feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach at the thought of the Do-or-Die night exercise that surely lay ahead. It took him a full minute to remember that he was no longer in the Young Army and that he was actually safe.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Septimus opened his bedroom door and peered out into the entrance lobby, which was dimly lit by a small night candle.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  The sturdy oak panels of the door shook with the blows—someone was trying to break the door down. Septimus padded across to Marcia’s door but as he reached it, it was thrown open.

  “Septimus?” said Marcia, bleary in her purple night robe. “What is going on?”

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  “There’s someone at the door,” Septimus said, rather unnecessarily.

  “Marcia!” a voice called. “Marcia, it’s me, Alice!”

  Marcia tugged open the doors. “Alice? Goodness, you look awful. Come in.”

  “Marcia. I’m really sorry to wake you but …” Alice glanced over her shoulder, half-afraid that DomDaniel might be lurking in the dark corridor behind her, listening. Alice dropped her voice to a whisper. “DomDaniel’s outside.”

  “What?” Marcia gasped.

  “Come and see.” Alice took Marcia—with Septimus following—over to the round window on the landing that looked down onto the Quayside. She looked out and her heart sank. The Quayside was packed with even more Hallowseeth revelers, who were gathered excitedly at the water’s edge around the Port Witch Coven show. There was no sign of DomDaniel anywhere.

  Alice shook her head. “Oh, I can’t see him. There are so many people.”

  Marcia looked down at the bizarre crowd below. She respected Alice Nettles very much indeed, but she could not help but think that Alice had mistaken someone dressed up as DomDaniel. How could she possibly tell the difference in such a muddle of people, and at night, too? Marcia sighed. What unfortunate timing for Septimus’s visit to the Port. Why hadn’t she remembered it was their Hallowseeth?

  Alice felt horribly embarrassed. “I am so sorry to wake you up, Marcia. But it really was DomDaniel; I am sure of it. He came right up to my window and stared at me. And he had that ring with those two evil green faces …” Alice shuddered. “It was horrible.”

  Marcia saw how shaken Alice was, and she knew that Alice was not given to fanciful imaginings. “Don’t worry, Alice,” she said. “I’ll go down and take a look.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Alice.

  “So will I,” said Septimus.

  “No, Septimus,” said Marcia. “You will stay here.”

  “But I’m your Apprentice now. It’s my job to come with you,” Septimus said.

  “Not this time, Septimus. I don’t want you anywhere near that evil old Necromancer. You may watch if you must.”

  Marcia hurried back to her room. She put her ExtraOrdinary Wizard belt around her purple night robe, threw her cloak over her shoulders and pulled on her pointy purple python shoes. She was ready.

  Marcia and Alice emerged from the Customs House unnoticed. The Quayside was thronged with so many bizarre costumes that no one paid any attention to an ExtraOrdinary Wizard in a night robe. “Over there.” Marcia pointed to the center of activity surrounding the Port Witch Coven. “Something’s going on.”

  “It’s some kind of performance, I think,” said Alice. “About the Port Witch Coven.”

  The sound of chanting began and the crowd started clapping along in time, vigorously stamping their feet.

  “Let’s take a closer look,” said Marcia. “Alther always said that if you found trouble, you would find DomDaniel in the middle of it.”

  Alice smiled at the mention of Alther. “Well, that is where DomDaniel was before he came over to my window.”

  “There you are, then,” said Marcia. “Let’s go and see.”

  The throng was so thick that Marcia and Alice had to skirt around the outside. They passed by the archway that led into Fishguts Twist—a dark and slimy place that smelled of old cabbage. Marcia stopped.

  “What is it?” whispered Alice.

  Marcia shook her head. Something Darke was nearby, but not as Darke as she would have expected if it were DomDaniel. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Not him?” asked Alice.

  “Hmm. Let’s have a look.” Marcia took a small glass ball from her ExtraOrdinary Wizard belt, warmed it in her hand, then, holding it between finger and thumb, she gingerly put her hand into the gloom of the archway. The little ball glowed brightly, and to Marcia’s surprise it showed no shadows of Darke at all—just an old stone bench to their left and ahead the winding, torch-lit alley with its Magykal bookshops, which Marcia was looking forward to visiting with Septimus. Marcia shrugged. “That’s odd,” she said to Alice. “I was sure there was something in here.”

  From its hiding place underneath the stone bench, the Darke Toad was keeping out of the way of the heavily booted Port feet. All human feet looked much the same to the Darke Toad—big, ugly and, when they were wearing their foot armor, dangerous. But when a pair of purple pointy python shoes stopped in front of it, the Darke Toad shrank back in fear. These were the most terrifying shoes he had ever seen. The Magyk surrounding them was as strong as the dreadful smell of snake that emanated from them. The Darke Toad quickly backed into the end of a drainpipe and hoped the snakes did not come after it. It waited anxiously until the snakes turned and went away, then it rubbed itself in a convenient pool of slime to get rid of the prickling sensation of Magyk. Five minutes later, its Master found it.

  DomDaniel sat down on the stone bench very carefully and heaved a sigh of relief. Despite an unpleasant slipping sensation inside him whenever he moved, his Clothed Bones had worked well enough to allow him to throw up a Darke Screen and do a bit of Selective Invisibility on old Marcia Overstrand—or Nastier Overstrand, as he liked to call her—and that annoying woman she was with. What was her name? Malice Dock Leaf, that was it. Of course, he could have had a showdown if he had wanted to, but he preferred to bide his time. He was planning something rather special for old Nastier and he didn’t want to spoil it.

  DomDaniel looked out from the archway, watching the Hallowseeth revelers milling around the harborside. He thought how amusing it would be to make them become what they were dressed as for real
—that would show them. He smiled. Maybe next year, when Nastier had been disposed of and he was ExtraOrdinary Wizard once more. But right now he fancied a little nap.

  Simon Heap returned with a bag of hot Hallowseeth herrings (a Port delicacy) for his Master—as he’d been instructed—and found him snoring. Simon put the herrings down on the bench and tiptoed away to join the throng. The lure of normal life—or as normal as it got at Hallowseeth in the Port—was irresistible.

  9

  WORKING THE CROWD

  Marcia and Alice pushed their way through the stamping, clapping and highly excited crowd. Marcia was unused to people not making way for her at once. “Excuse me, excuse me,” she repeated irritably, over and over again.

  “Oi! Just because you’re dressed like old Bossy Boots doesn’t mean you have to behave like her too,” a giant Bogle Bug remonstrated as Marcia tried to elbow it out of the way. Marcia then found her path to the witches deliberately blocked by the Bogle Bug’s friends—a giant Water Nixie, a luminous Specter and two pink Magogs.

  “Stop pushing, will you?” one of the pink Magogs told Marcia. “We can’t all be at the front!”

  Marcia resisted the urge to send a self-propelled Sting Bug into the Magog’s costume and doggedly carried on through the throng. She and Alice were heading for a space at the front of the crowd, where an open metal box lay on the edge of the Quay. Around the box—in which a sea of worms wriggled and writhed—were Linda, the Witch Mother, Veronica and Daphne, who had her fists tightly clamped over her eyes.

  It was Linda who was running the show—she had the crowd in the palm of her hand and was chanting an Incantation in time to the stamping feet. At the end of each phrase she turned to the crowd and yelled, “Yeah!” which the crowd repeated with gusto. Linda’s eyes shone with exhilaration; with every “Yeah!” the crowd added their energy to the spell. This is going to be massive, Linda thought.

  “Let them fly way up high! Yeah!” Linda screamed.

  “Yeah!” the crowd yelled in return.

  “Let them grow when they go! Yeah!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Let what we see no longer be! Yeah!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Let them be part of the sea! Yeah!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Let them be … gribble!”

  There was a sudden, shocked silence.

  “Gribble?” a mummy in front of Marcia muttered to its fellow mummy. “But isn’t that one of those worms?”

  “Yeah. Er, I mean yes. Ship-eating worms.”

  The first mummy laughed. “Hey, Bill, we’re acting like it’s real.”

  Bill-the-Mummy laughed uneasily. “Felt like it,” he said.

  Linda had forgotten she was in the middle of a crowd of people who were closely connected with all things maritime. Almost every person on that Quay knew what gribble worms were—little marine worms that ate their way through ships’ timbers in no time at all. A ship could set off from Port with a few gribbles buried in its timbers and a couple of weeks later disappear into the ocean, leaving nothing more than a froth of wood dust on the surface of the water.

  But Linda was no fool; she sensed that the crowd was turning against her. The Incantation needed time to brew—there were thousands of worms to turn—and Linda knew she had to get the crowd back on her side for at least another two minutes.

  “But hey, guys, we don’t want to do that—do we?” she yelled.

  “No!” a few uncertain shouts came in reply.

  “We want to have fun!” Linda shouted, frantically jumping up and down and grinning so hard that she thought her face might crack. “Hey! And that’s what we are going to do. Fun! Yeah?”

  It worked.

  “Yeah!” yelled the crowd.

  This was too much for Daphne. She turned to the crowd and screamed out, “But it’s not fun. It’s not. I hate you, Linda. I hate you all!”

  Linda—once a supremely accomplished playground bully—recognized an opportunity. “Ooh,” she said. “She hates us. Ooh.”

  “Ooh,” those in the crowd who had not been bullied echoed obligingly.

  “Perhaps I should turn her into a gribble?”

  “Yeah!” someone yelled from the back. “Gribble!”

  Linda reckoned she was getting the crowd back on her side. “She’d like that,” she said. “She’d like it in there, wriggling around with her slimy little friends.” Linda pointed to the box at her feet, which was now, to her relief, glowing a bright orange and hissing. She grabbed Daphne by the collar and asked the audience, “So, what do you say—shall I turn this moaning little worm into a gribble?”

  The audience sensed some fun was on the way. “Yeah!” more people shouted. “Yeah! Turn her into a gribble!” A chant began to build. “Grib-ull, grib-ull, grib-ull!”

  Daphne looked horrified. She wrenched herself away from Linda and ran. The crowd parted to make way for her exit and Daphne cannoned straight into Marcia. There was a roar of laughter.

  “Brilliant timing!” said someone. “Absolutely brilliant.”

  Marcia winced as Daphne’s sticky witch cloak brushed against the Magyk in her own cloak.

  “These witches are very realistic,” Alice shouted to Marcia over the noise.

  “They’re more than realistic, Alice,” Marcia shouted back. “They’re real.”

  “Real?” Alice yelled. “Really real?”

  “There’s a witchy Darkenesse in the air you could cut with a knife,” said Marcia.

  “But Marcia, if they’re real, then what they are doing is real too,” Alice said.

  “I would imagine so,” Marcia said drily. With Alice at her heels, Marcia moved rapidly through the cleared space and headed toward Linda, who was now working her audience into a frenzy.

  “What do we want?” Linda was shouting.

  “Grib-ull, grib-ull!” everyone yelled.

  “When do we want it?”

  “Now!”

  To the delight of the crowd Marcia, backed up by Alice, was now face-to-face with Linda. “Hey, Wizard and witch fight!” someone yelled.

  The call was quickly taken up: “Wizard and witch! Fight! Fight! Fight! Wizard and witch! Fight! Fight! Fight!”

  “Quiet!” Linda yelled—and such was her crowd control that she got it at once. “Gribble first—then fight! Yeah?”

  “Yeah!” yelled the crowd. “Gribble first! Then fight!”

  Eyeing the suspiciously glowing box of woodworms, Marcia waited until the noise had died away enough for her to be heard. Then she took a deep breath and yelled, “Port Witch Coven! I command you to stop. Now!”

  “Spoilsport!” came a shout from the crowd, and it was quickly taken up into a chant. “Spo-il-sport! Spo-il-sport! Spo-il-sport!”

  Linda laughed and Marcia felt horribly uncomfortable. She had forgotten how much she had come to rely on the respect people automatically gave her as ExtraOrdinary Wizard. Suddenly she was just another Hallowseeth reveler in a dodgy costume—and it was a shock.

  Eager to see what was happening, people began to push past Marcia and Alice, who were quickly edged out of the space around the witches. Marcia lost patience. With the help of a few well-judged Pushes, she emerged into the clearing. In front of her sat the box—from which emanated a powerful, crowd-fueled Magyk—now alive with writhing woodworms glowing brilliant red. Linda and the Witch Mother were staring into the contents, willing them to do something fast.

  Veronica saw Marcia coming. “Pigs!” she said. “It’s the pigging ExtraOrdinary Wizard!”

  “It’s only some idiot in a purple nightie, stupid,” snapped Linda.

  But the Witch Mother knew Marcia from way back. “No, it’s not,” she snapped. “Quick, Linda. Do it!”

  Linda became flustered. “It’s done, you stupid old trout,” she hissed. “We just have to wait for it to—”

  Marcia was upon them.

  “Pig off!” yelled Linda.

  Marcia hurled a Freeze Flash at them.


  It was too late. Its energy was diverted into the witches’ Magyk and it triggered the spell. There was a deafening boom that resonated all around the harborside. The crowd screamed in excitement, Daphne’s box erupted in a blaze of light and a stream of brilliant red stars whooshed into the sky. All eyes followed them as they rose up and up, and then with a faint pfut broke into myriad pinpoints of light that rained gently down and settled daintily onto the ships. A roar of appreciation came from the crowd, followed by riotous applause.

  “Jolly good,” Linda said to the Witch Mother. “The rats will be jumping ship soon. Now, girls, lose yourselves in the crowd before anyone realizes what’s going on. Remember, I want a kid small enough to fit up the sewer pipe. It so needs unblocking. Ha ha.”

  “Stop right there!” said Marcia.

  “Oh stuff off,” Linda snarled, and pushed past Marcia. Marcia swung around and threw a long, low Trip-Up that went curling around Linda’s feet, sending the witch sprawling onto the wet cobblestones. Linda burst out laughing. “Too late!” she yelled. “Too pigging late!”

  A shriek from Alice Nettles took Marcia’s attention away from the witches.

  “Oh my goodness,” gasped Marcia. The ships were melting.

  10

  GRIBBLES

  A horrified silence fell across the harborside as the crowd watched the masts of the three ships that had been directly beneath the cascade of stars rapidly crumble into nothing. It took many long, shocked seconds for the assorted Specters, Bogle Bugs, mummies, Grula-Grulas, Chimeras and Gragull to understand that this was actually happening for real. But as the Quayside reverberated to the hollow thud of sails and ropes falling onto decks, then the long, slow crunching sound of decks folding in under their weight like wet paper bags, people at last began to react. They rushed toward the ships and began urging the sailors to jump. Many hurried off to the Chandlery to fetch ropes and life buoys. A party of young Specters bravely leaped into the water and began hauling out anyone they could find.