Witch Baby and Me

by Debi Gliori

  ‘Exactly,’ croaks the Toad, her bulging eyes almost falling out of her head with the horror of it all.

  ‘They’ll teach Witchcraft in schools,’ the Nose continues gloomily. ‘Someone’ll write a bestselling book about it . . . then the whole wide world will beat a path to our door . . .’

  ‘I think we can do something about that,’ says the Chin, smiling unpleasantly. ‘The baby is very young. She will not develop her full powers or her voice until much later. Her spells will be weak and easily broken. She will only be able to do one at a time, and they won’t last long. Every time she cries, as babies do, her magic will fail. She won’t be able to tell anyone what fun it is to be a witch for a long time. And as for Lily: I suspect that nobody will believe her. If nobody else can see that her baby sister is a witch, it will simply appear as if Lily’s making it all up. So . . . let’s not be too hasty. Time is on our side, dear Sisters. We can afford to wait and see if Lily really is a danger to our way of life, and if so, we have more than enough time to arrange for her to have a little . . . accident.’

  ‘Sssso,’ hisses the Nose, turning her back to the fireplace, ‘you’re saying that our secret is safe for now. Only the Witch Baby’s sister can see what’s really going on, but—’

  ‘Why?’ interrupts the Toad, her voice quivering like toadspawn. ‘Nobody has given me a reason why Lily can see what Daisy is. I thought only Hiss Sisters could see other witches.’

  ‘Yesssss,’ sighs the Chin. ‘And then again, no. It’s true that most humans wouldn’t recognize a witch if she bit them on the leg—’

  what a hideous thought,’ mutters the Nose.

  ‘Most humans are blind to the presence of magic,’ the Chin continues wearily. ‘But very occasionally you get a kid who is brave, plays a musical instrument, likes Brussels sprouts—’

  splutters the Toad. ‘That’s imposs—’

  ‘Don’t interrupt,’ snaps the Chin. ‘As I was saying, once in a blue moon a cluster of these weird kids will appear and then our secret will be a secret no longer. Our Witch Baby’s sister Lily is one.’ The Chin pauses to sniff in disgust before adding, ‘She won’t be a problem, though. Nobody ever listens to her, so no matter how many times she tries to tell her parents about our Witch Baby, they won’t believe her. Everyone will assume she’s making up stories about the new baby because she’s jealous. It’s not Lily I’m worried about. I’m far more worried that there are others like her out there.’

  Silence falls. The Nose and the Toad don’t dare speak. Finally the Chin shudders and carries on. ‘Put it this way. If another one of these children comes along and sees that she’s a Witch Baby, we’re in trouble. But don’t worry. It may never happen. There’s only a one-in-a-million chance that another one of these kids will appear. Trust me, it’ll all work out.’

  There is a brief silence, then:

  mutters the Toad. ‘Last time you said that, look what happened to me.’

  Poor Toad. Poor Sisters, too. All they want is a little Witch Baby of their very own. Instead, they’ve made Daisy. Who knows what will happen now?

  For a long time, not a lot does happen. At least, not when anyone’s looking. After all, nobody notices what Daisy does in her cot at night when her family is sleeping. Fortunately for Daisy, nobody notices the scorch-marks on the roof; nor do they spot her little baby footprints on the kitchen ceiling. Meanwhile, Daisy has her first birthday, her big brother Jack has his twelfth, her big sister Lily turns nine and the whole family moves house.

  Hundreds of miles to the north, in their secret home on top of Ben Screeeiiighe, the Nose, the Toad and the Chin watch and wait. The Sisters do not celebrate birthdays and they have no intention of moving house ever. Not unless things go disastrously wrong, that is . . .

  * * *

  1 We are all made from this stuff. Whatever it is. Ask your mother to explain.

  2 No. Me either. I’m hoping it doesn’t hurt.

  3 Okay? OKAY? Read the Toad’s warty green lips. We. Don’t. Go. There.

  One:

  Things begin to go disastrously wrong

  RIGHT. LET’S GET this bit over with very quickly because I may not have much time left. Three minutes ago, my name was Lily MacRae and I was nine years, two months and three days old. Three minutes ago, I lived in the Old Station House in a tiny village in the Highlands of Scotland. We only moved in a few weeks ago, but the minute I walked through the front door I knew I didn’t want to live here. Nobody I know lives here and I miss my old friends so much it hurts. I want to go back and live in our lovely old house in Edinburgh, but that’s not going to happen. Not now that we’ve moved to the quietest, loneliest, most boring place in the whole world. Which means that unless I want to die of loneliness, I’m going to have to make new friends.

  New friends, new house, and a new life. Same family, though. I live with Mum and Dad and my big brother Jack and – flash of lightning, roll of thunder – My Baby Sister. That’s sister with an extra hiss.

  So, four minutes ago, Mum sat up in her coffin, her red eyes glowing and blood dripping off her fangs, and said, ‘Take your Draculina out for a quick bite, would you, Lily?’

  Actually, I made that bit up. Four minutes ago, Mum said, ‘Lily, be a darling. I need to make some very long and boring phone calls and Daisy needs her nap. Could you please take her into the garden and see if you can get her to sleep?’

  Two things I want to point out here. First of all: Daisy. My baby sister is the least Daisyish baby in the whole wide world. If Mum and Dad had to pick a flowery name, why didn’t they pick Cactus? Or Venus Fly Trap? Or even Nettle? But Daisy? That’s a bit like calling your pet shark Nibbles.

  The other thing is that I stand more chance of getting Daisy to fly than getting her to sleep. Mum can’t get her to sleep, Dad can’t get her to sleep, I can’t get her to sleep – but put her anywhere near my big brother Jack, and Daisy’s eyes roll back in her head and . . . she’s gone. Fast asleep in seconds. How does Jack do it? Simple. Jack grunts a lot, turns up his music and goes, in answer to everything1:

  More pudding, Jack?

  Don’t you think you’re going to damage your ears having your music turned up like that?

  The-Earth-is-about-to-be-blown-up-by-Martians-and-you-have-three-seconds-left-before-you-turn-into-a-cinder.

  Anyway. Three minutes ago, I was me. Me, Lily MacRae, pushing my little sister Daisy round the garden in her pram. That was then. This is now. And now . . . now, I think I’m about to die of embarrassment.

  Why? Because two minutes ago, my little baby sister turned me into a – I can hardly bear to say it – a . . . a . . . slug. One minute I was wheeling her around the garden making go-to-sleep-Daisy noises, and the next minute I was on the ground, slithering along on my tummy. I didn’t even realize I’d changed into a slug until I caught sight of my reflection in a puddle.

  I screamed, and then,

  I’m black and slimy. How on earth am I supposed to make new friends like that?

  Hi. My name’s Lily and— . . . forget it. I’ll just slither away and get on with dying of embarrassment.

  From now on, my life will be all about eating raw cabbage and squeezing slime out of my bottom. This sounds like a . I hate cabbage. When Mum and Dad come looking for me and Daisy, first thing they’ll say is, ‘Where has Lily gone? Fancy running off and leaving poor Daisy all alone. Poor little baby, . . .’

  And then, . There’s a slug under Daisy’s pushchair. How disgusting.’

  I hope they won’t hurl me in the pond or over the hedge into the next-door garden. I mean, I might die. Killed by my very own loving mum and dad. I want to scream, IT’S SOOO NOT FAIR, at the top of my lungs, but I’m not even sure if slugs have lungs . . .

  Daisy has lungs, though. Boy, does she have lungs. She is so loud.

  I slither backwards to get a better look.

  I go.

  ‘WAY LILY GONE?’ she roars. ‘WayYYY LILY?’

  Oh, dear. Daisy gets louder
when she’s cross. She thinks I’ve vanished. If I wasn’t a slug, I could soon cheer her up. But right now all I can do is squirt and slither and cover her in slime. Poor Daisy. Poor me, too.

  I’ve had fourteen months of Daisy the Witch Baby, but it’s not getting any easier. You probably think I’d be used to her witchy ways by now, but I’m not. Every time she casts a spell, it takes me by surprise, and not in a good way. Take the first time I saw her. It was the day Dad took Jack and me to the hospital to see Mum and our new baby, Daisy. The new baby lay in a little cot beside Mum’s bed. I was really excited. I couldn’t wait to hold her. I bent over the cot and there she was, Baby Daisy, gazing at the ceiling with her big golden eyes. I had about two seconds to notice she had a pair of wings folded under her spine, a tail curled neatly beside her hind legs, and flames flickering in and out of her nostrils, before her big eyes swivelled in my direction and I screamed:

  The baby’s turned into a dragon!’

  That was the moment my life changed for ever. Because first Mum, then Dad and then even Jack turned to me and said, ‘Don’t be silly, Lily. Daisy’s not a dragon, she’s a baby.’

  Excuse me? Anyone could see the baby wasn’t human, couldn’t they?

  I looked at Daisy. Daisy blinked her golden eyes, burped out a tiny flame and burst into tears. Immediately, she changed back. Into my little baby sister. I blinked. Had I just seen that? Was I dreaming?

  ‘Here,’ said Dad, ‘why don’t you hold her? Give your new baby sister a little cuddle. Go on. She won’t bite – ha ha ha.’

  I was terrified. Dad knew nothing. What if she turned into a dragon again? Or worse? I risked a peek at the heavy bundle Dad had put in my arms. It wasn’t a dragon. It was a very small baby. A very small baby in a black babygro with something written across its front.

  There. In black and white. The proof that I wasn’t dreaming.

  ‘Dad, look. Look. It says on her front. “Witch Baby”. There. See? Told you so.’

  ‘LILY.’ Dad sounded cross. ‘That’s enough of that Witch Baby nonsense. Time for us to go home and let Mum and Daisy get some sleep.’

  ‘But . . . but, Dad. LOOK.’ I couldn’t believe it. Was he blind? What was going on?

  There it was, in big white letters on Daisy’s babygro. Wasn’t it? I checked. Sure enough, there were the big white letters, but now they said:

  ‘That was a bit risky, wasn’t it?’ said the Chin. ‘What if someone had believed Lily?’

  ‘Poor child. Aren’t we being a bit mean?’ demanded the Toad, whose heart was far more tender than those of her Sisters.

  ‘Mean, schmean,’ sniffed the Nose. ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few frying pans. Besides,’ she added with a smirk, ‘think about it. No one ever listens to children. Especially not when they’re telling the truth. The more Lily tries to tell everybody about Daisy, the safer our little secret becomes. I tell you, Sisters, our plan is perfect. Nothing can possibly go wrong.’

  Dad, Jack and I drove home in silence. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Was I going mad? I was so sure I’d seen our new baby turn into a dragon, but nobody else had seen anything.

  Worse was to come. From that day on, I never knew what version of Daisy was going to be waiting for me inside her cot. One day she was a baby frog, squatting on her quilt. The next, she was a little eel, slipping out of my arms and coiling across the floor like a snake. The day after, a tiny crocodile, snapping at my arm with her gummy jaws. Baby footprints appeared where no footprints should have been, but only I could see them. Sometimes Daisy smelled of bonfires, but no one else noticed. In the middle of all this weirdness, there was one thing I was one hundred per cent sure about. Whatever Daisy was, she certainly wasn’t a normal baby.

  Mum still didn’t notice, nor did Dad, so I tried to convince my big brother Jack that Daisy was a witch, but I could tell he wasn’t listening. Actually, he couldn’t hear a word I was saying because he had his earbuds in. I could have danced up and down in front of him pulling faces like a gargoyle and he would just have smiled and nodded as he shut his bedroom door in my face.

  Mum didn’t listen either. She got a faraway look in her eyes and said it would Take Time To Adjust To The New Baby. Poor Mum. She knows nothing. Fourteen months have passed and I still haven’t adjusted. I mean, I love Daisy to bits, but how am I ever supposed to adjust to sharing my life with a witch, even if she is a little teeny-weeny one? Under her pink babygro lies a junior member of the Society of Women with Pointy Hats, Chin Warts and Spelling Issues. If this was a film of My Life, there would be a roll of thunder, a flash of lightning and a distant scream. My little sister is – gasp – a Witch Baby.

  And nobody knows it but me.

  * * *

  1 This is so boring it even makes me want to go to sleep.

  Two:

  The problem with Witch Baby,

  by Lilly (a.k.a. The Slug)

  THE THING IS, witches aren’t like us. Not deep inside, where it counts. Witch Baby looks like one of us: she has two green eyes, one little button nose and the correct number of arms and legs in all the right places. Just like you and me. But that’s where it ends. Between her ears, in the place where we have a brain, Witch Baby has a . . .

  Well, actually, I have no idea what she’s got in there, but whatever it is, it’s nothing like a normal baby brain.

  How do I know? Let me explain. Normal babies are happy sitting on their bottoms, picking things up off the floor – balls, bricks, bluebottles – and sticking them straight into their mouths. Sometimes they go Num-num-num if the bluebottle was really tasty. That’s normal babies we’re talking about, not Witch Babies. My Witch Baby doesn’t pick things up. At least, not when she thinks nobody’s looking. When she thinks no one can see her, she stares, claps her hands, and then whatever she wants to pick up comes floating through the air towards her.

  Sounds pretty cool, huh? Trust me, it isn’t. Take yesterday. Yesterday she wanted the fridge. Luckily Mum was upstairs unpacking, so she didn’t see what happened. I did, though. I turned my back on Witch Baby for a nanosecond . . . and caught sight of the biscuit tin. The open biscuit tin with one lonely Kit-Kat finger inside. I’m not exactly sure what happened next, but I’m sure I heard that Kit-Kat speak. I’m positive it said (very quietly) so that only I could hear: Go on, eat me now.

  Well. What was I supposed to do?

  Exactly. So, licking my chocolate-covered fingers to remove the evidence, I turned back and there was Witch Baby, giggling . . . and there was the fridge, floating right above my head.

  I couldn’t scream, in case I startled Witch Baby and she forgot that she was holding the fridge over my head with nothing stronger than the Power of her Thoughts. Powerful as they are, Daisy’s thoughts (or spells, to give them their proper name) can be broken by Daisy bursting into tears or being distracted. Some of her spells s . . . l . . . o . . . w . . . l . . . y fade away to nothing, and others vanish instantly. So, for instance, if the spell holding the fridge in the air were to vanish instantly, I would be a very Squished Lily. However, if I distract Daisy rather then startling her, there’s a good chance she might put the fridge down, rather than drop it.

  ‘Wah-woo-wuh?’ I said. My voice had gone all wobbly. I tried again. ‘Woo-woo-would you like a biscuit?’

  Witch Baby’s eyes narrowed a fraction. The fridge stopped floating and became very still. Almost as if it was waiting for something.

  ‘Biccit?’

  Before we go any further, I should explain that Witch Baby is a person of few words. She can say all the usual baby words like Mumma, Dadda, wantit, wantit now, biccit, no likeit dat. As well as these, Witch Baby has a few more words not normally spoken by small persons in nappies. Words like and and If you listen very carefully, you can just about understand what she’s trying to say: and

  You have to listen very hard, though. For some reason, Mum and Dad are no good at listening properly – they never seem to hear what
Daisy is saying. ‘Ahhhh,’ they coo, ‘listen to Daisy. She’s saying woof. Are you playing at being our little puppy? Ahhhh, bless. Does it want a doggy biccit?’

  Biscuits. That reminded me. I was about to be squished under the fridge all because of a biscuit.

  ‘Not biccit,’ my would-be murderer decided. ‘Not likeit, dat. Want udder one.’

  The fridge quivered slightly, and so did I. Udder one? What other one?

  ‘Cat-Cat. Wantit.’

  Oh, dear. This was Very Bad News indeed. She meant she wanted the last Kit-Kat. Which was inside my tummy along with two slices of toast and peanut butter, one bowl of cornflakes and half a banana. Sadly, the Kit-Kat was non-returnable. At least not in any form that Witch Baby would enjoy.

  ‘Wantit biccit. Wantit nowwwwww.’

  And now Witch Baby’s face was turning as red as the wrapper of the biscuit she wanted. My legs turned to jelly. Help. I was in big trouble. I was in the deepest of deep poo. I might be about to die for lack of a chocolate biscuit. My life flashed before my eyes, including the last ten million times I’ve heard Witch Baby throw a wobbly. And then I remembered two very important rules I’ve learned about what to do when Witch Babies throw wobblies.

  RULE NUMBER ONE: it may seem unkind, but try to ignore the fact your baby is going purple and turning itself into a cross between a boiled goblin and a shriek alarm. Being ignored will teach Baby that throwing a wobbly is very boring and does not get results.