Witch Week (18 page)

Nan stretched out her hands again. Now she knew she could do it, she felt quite confident.

“Agga, tagga, ragga, roast.

Wear the clothes you want the most.”

The rag-storm began again. In Estelle’s case, it started black and swirled very promisingly into pale brown and red. Around Nan, it seemed to be turning pink. When the storm stopped, there was Estelle, looking very trim and pretty in jodhpurs, red sweater, and hard hat, with her legs in shiny boots, pointing at Nan with a riding crop and making helpless bursting noises.

Nan looked down at herself. It seemed that the sort of clothes she wanted most was the dress she had imagined Dulcinea Wilkes wearing to ride her broomstick around London in. She was in a shiny pink silk balldress. The full skirt swept the wet grass. The tight pink bodice left her shoulders bare. It had blue bows up the front and lace in the sleeves. No wonder Estelle was laughing! Pink silk was definitely a mistake for someone as plump as Nan. Why pink? she wondered. Probably she had gotten that idea from the school blankets.

She had her hands stretched out to try again, when they heard Karen Grigg shouting outside the shrubbery. “Estelle!
Estelle!
Where are you? Miss Philips wants to know where you’ve gotten to!”

Estelle and Nan turned and ran. Estelle’s clothes were ideal for sprinting through bushes. Nan’s were not. She lumbered and puffed behind Estelle, and wet leaves kept showering her bare shoulders with water. Her sleeves got in her way. Her skirt wrapped around her legs and kept catching on bushes. Just at the edge of the shrubbery, the dress got stuck on a twig and tore with such a loud ripping noise that Estelle whirled around in horror.

“Wait!” panted Nan. She wrenched the pink skirt loose and tore the whole bottom part of it off. She wrapped the torn bit like a scarf around her wet shoulders. “That’s better.”

After that, she could keep up with Estelle quite easily. They slipped through onto the school drive and pelted down it and out through the iron gates. Nan meant to stop and change the pink dress into something else in the road outside, but there was a man sweeping the pavement just beyond the gates. He stopped sweeping and stared at the two of them. A little further on, there were two ladies with shopping bags, who stared even harder. Nan put her head down in acute embarrassment as they walked past the ladies. She had strips of torn pink silk hanging down and clinging to the pale blue stockings she seemed to have changed her socks into. Below that, she seemed to have given herself pink ballet shoes.

“Will you call for me at my ballet class after you’ve had your riding lesson?” she said loudly and desperately to Estelle.

“I might. But I’m scared of your ballet teacher,” Estelle said, playing up bravely.

They got past the ladies, but there were more people further down the road. The further they got into town, the more people there were. By the time they came to the shops, Nan knew she was not going to get a chance to change the pink balldress.

“You look awfully pretty. Really,” Estelle said consolingly.

“No, I don’t. It’s like a bad dream,” said Nan.

“In my bad dreams like that, I don’t have any clothes on at all,” said Estelle.

At last they reached the strange red brick castle which was the Old Gate House. Estelle, looking white and nervous, led Nan up the steps and under the pointed porch. Nan pulled the large bell pull hanging beside the pointed front door. Then they stood under the arch and waited, more nervous than ever.

For a long time, they thought nobody was going to answer the door. Then, after nearly five minutes, it opened, very slowly and creaking a great deal. A very old lady stood there, leaning on a stick, looking at them in some surprise.

Estelle was so nervous by then that she stuttered. “A—a w—way out in the n—name of D—Dulcinea,” she said.

“Oh dear!” said the old lady. “My dears, I’m so sorry. The inquisitors broke up the organization here several years ago. If it wasn’t for my age, I’d be in prison now. They come and check up on me every week. I daren’t do a thing.”

They stood and stared at her in utter dismay.

The old lady saw it. “If it’s a real emergency,” she said, “I can give you a spell. That’s all I can think of. Would you like that?”

They nodded, dismally.

“Then wait a moment, while I write it down,” said the old lady. She left the front door open and hobbled aside to a table at one side of the dark old hall. She opened a drawer in it and fumbled for some paper. She searched for a pen. Then she looked across at them. “You know, my dears, in order not to attract attention, you really should look as if you were collecting for charity. I can pretend to be writing you a check. Can either of you manage collecting boxes?”

“I can,” said Nan. She had almost lost her voice with fright and dismay. She had to cough. She did not dare risk saying spells, standing there on the steps of the old house, up above the busy street. She simply waved a quivering hand and hoped.

Instant weight bore her hand down. A mighty collecting tin dangled from her arm, and another dangled from Estelle’s. Each was as big as a tin of paint. Each had a huge red cross on one side and chinked loudly from their nervous trembling.

“That’s better,” said the old lady, and started, very slowly, to write.

The outsize tins did indeed make Nan and Estelle feel easier while they waited. People passing certainly looked up at them curiously, but most of them smiled when they saw the tins. And they were standing there for quite a long time, because, as well as writing very slowly, the old lady kept calling across to them.

“Do either of you know the Portway Oaks?” she called. They shook their heads. “Pity. You have to go there to say this,” said the old lady. “It’s a ring of trees just below the forest. I’d better draw you a map then.” She drew, slowly. Then she called, “I don’t know why they’re called the Oaks. Every single tree there is a beech tree.” Later still, she called, “Now I’m writing down the way you should pronounce it.”

The girls still stood there. Nan was beginning to wonder if the old lady was really in league with the inquisitors and keeping them there on purpose, when the old lady at last folded up the paper and shuffled back to the front door.

“There you are, my dears. I wish I could do more for you.”

Nan took the paper. Estelle produced a bright artificial smile. “Thanks awfully,” she said. “What does it do?”

“I’m not sure,” said the old lady. “It’s been handed down in my family for use in emergencies, but no one has ever used it before. I’m told it’s very powerful.”

Like many old people, the old lady spoke rather too loudly. Nan and Estelle looked nervously over their shoulders at the street below, but nobody seemed to have heard. They thanked the old lady politely and, when the front door shut, they went drearily back down the steps, lugging their huge collecting tins.

“I suppose we’d better use it,” said Estelle. “We daren’t go back now.”

C
HARLES JOGGED
around the playing field towards the groundsman’s hut. He hoped anyone who saw him would think he was out running for PE. For this reason, he had changed into his small sky-blue running shorts before he slipped away. When he had time, he supposed he could transform the shorts into jeans or something. But the important thing at the moment was to get hold of that mangy old broom people had been taunting Nan Pilgrim with the other day. If he got to that before anyone noticed he was missing, he could ride away on it and no dog on earth could pick up his trail.

He reached the hut, in its corner beside the kitchen gardens. He crept around it to its door. At the same moment, Nirupam crept around it from the opposite side, also in sky-blue shorts, and stretched out his long arm for the door too. The two of them stared at one another. All sorts of ideas for things to say streamed through Charles’s mind, from explaining he was just dodging PE, to accusing Nirupam of kidnapping Brian. In the end, he said none of these things. Nirupam had hold of the doorlatch by then.

“Bags I the broomstick,” Charles said.

“Only if there are two of them,” said Nirupam. His face was yellow with fear. He pulled open the door and dodged into the hut. Charles dived in after him.

There was not even the one old broomstick. There were flowerpots, buckets, an old roller, a new roller, four rakes, two spades, a hoe, and an old wet mop propped in one of the buckets. And that was all.

“Who took it?” Charles said wildly.

“Nobody brought it back,” said Nirupam.

“Oh, magic it all!” said Charles. “What shall we
do
?”

“Use something else,” said Nirupam. “Or walk.” He seized the nearest spade and stood astride it, bending and stretching his great long legs. “Fly,” he told the spade. “Go on, fly, magic you!”

Nirupam had the right idea, Charles saw. A witch surely ought to be able to make anything fly. “I should think a rake would fly better,” he said, and quickly grabbed hold of the wet mop for himself. The mop was so old that it had stuck to the bucket. Charles was forced to put one foot on the bucket and pull, before it came loose, and a lot of the head got left behind in the bucket. The result was a stick ending in a scraggly gray stump. Charles seized it and stood astride it. He jumped up and down. “Fly!” he told the mop. “Quick!”

Nirupam threw the spade down and snatched up the hoe. Together they jumped desperately around the hut. “Fly!” they panted. “Fly!”

In an old, soggy, dispirited way, the mop obeyed. It wallowed up about three feet into the air and wove towards the hut door. Nirupam was wailing in despair, when the hoe took off too, with a buck and a rush, as if it did not want to be left behind. Nirupam shot past Charles with his huge legs flailing. “It works!” he panted triumphantly, and went off in another kangaroo bound towards the kitchen gardens.

They were forbidden to go in the kitchen gardens, but it seemed the most secret way out of school. Charles followed Nirupam through the gate and down the gravel path, both of them trying to control their mounts. The mop wallowed and wove. It was like an old, old person, feebly hobbling through the air. The hoe either went by kangaroo surges, or it slanted and trailed its metal end along the path. Nirupam had to stick his feet out in front in order not to leave a scent on the ground. His eyes rolled in agony. He kept overtaking Charles and dropping behind. When they got to the wall at the end of the garden, both implements stopped. The mop wallowed about in the air. The hoe jittered its end on the gravel.

“They can’t go high enough to get over,” said Charles. “Now what?”

That might have been the end of their journey, had not the caretaker’s dog been sniffing about in the kitchen gardens and suddenly caught their scent. It came racing down the long path towards them, yapping. The hoe and the mop took off like startled cats. They soared over the wall, with Charles and Nirupam hanging on anyhow, and went bucking off down the fields beyond. They raced towards the main road, the mop surging, the hoe plunging and trailing, clearing hedges by a whisker and missing trees by inches. They did not slow down until they had put three fields between them and the caretaker’s dog.

“They must hate that dog as much as we do,” Nirupam gasped. “Was it you that did the
Simon Says
spell?”

“Yes,” said Charles. “Did you do the birds in music?”

“No,” said Nirupam, much to Charles’s surprise. “I did only one thing, and that was secret, but I daren’t stay if the inquisitors are going to bring a witch-detector. They always get you with those.”

“What did you do?” said Charles.

“You know that night all our shoes went into the hall,” said Nirupam. “Well, we had a feast that night. Dan Smith made me get up the floorboards and get the food out. He says I have no right to be so large and so weak,” Nirupam said resentfully, “and I was hating him for it, when I took the boards up and found a pair of running shoes, with spikes, hidden there with the food. I turned those shoes into a chocolate cake. I knew Dan was so greedy that he would eat it all himself. And he did eat it. He didn’t let anyone else have any. You may have noticed that he wasn’t quite himself the next day.”

So much had happened to Charles that particular day, that he could not remember Dan seeming anything at all. He didn’t have the heart to explain all the trouble Nirupam had caused him. “Those were my spikes,” he said sadly. He wobbled along on the mop rather awed at the thought of iron spikes passing through Dan’s stomach. “He must have a digestion like an ostrich!”

“The spikes were turned into cherries,” said Nirupam. “The soles were the cream. The shoes as a whole became what is called a Black Forest gâteau.”

Here they reached the main road and saw the tops of cars whipping past beyond the hedge. “We’ll have to wait for a gap in that traffic,” Charles said. “Stop!” he commanded the mop.

“Stop!” Nirupam cried to the hoe.

Neither implement took the slightest notice. Since Charles and Nirupam did not dare put their feet down for fear of leaving a scent for the dogs, they could find no way of stopping at all. They were carried helplessly over the hedge. Luckily, the road was down in a slight dip, and they had just enough height to clear the whizzing cars. Nirupam frantically bent his huge legs up. Charles tried not to let his legs dangle. Horns honked. He saw faces peering up at them, outraged and grinning. Charles suddenly saw how ridiculous they must look, both in their little blue shorts: himself with the disgraceful dirty old mop head wagging behind him; Nirupam lunging through the air in bunny hops, with a look of anguish on his face.