by Heide Goody
“Or driving us,” said Norma.
“Or maybe—” huff! “—these are their best shots.”
Above the pounding of blood in her ears, Dee heard the sound of ice-cream chimes. A glance across the lawns and she could see the headlights of Zoffner’s van making their way towards the side of the house. Zoffner and Kay were at least making a getaway.
A long thin blast of witchfire reached out from the darkness, across the grounds and found the ice-cream van with unerring accuracy. The van exploded in yellow flame, tossing the chassis up into the air in a brutal arc of destruction.
Effie beamed at the other women around the table. They were all so genuinely enthusiastic about her success with the witch school. She’d known from the start it was a good idea, and the fact that she’d answered so many questions was proof she was right. She glowed with the inner satisfaction of a job well done; and the effects of more alcohol than she was used to. Perhaps it also had something to do with the proximity of Mr Carter-King, who was delightfully attentive to all of the ladies. He was telling them a hilarious anecdote about an employee who’d climbed into an open lorry to sleep off the effects of his stag party and had woken up halfway across the North Sea. Mr Carter-King – Kevin as he insisted – put his hand on Effie’s arm several times during the telling.
There was a loud and unmistakeably clear bang from outside. Effie saw ripples in her water glass. “Oh! Surely you heard that?” She turned to Natasha. “A loud bang? A boom even. From outside?”
“I dropped my spoon,” said Bette. “Silly me! So sorry if it startled you, Effie. So what happened when he realised that his trousers were gone too, Kevin?”
Effie gave them all a weak smile and gazed at the after-tremors in the water.
“No!” screamed Dee, skidded to a halt and, fuelled by an instant rage, turned to fight. “You bitches are gonna pa—!”
Norma almost slammed into her. She grabbed Dee’s arm and hauled her onward.
“Don’t be an idiot, woman!” puffed the older woman.
“They killed them!”
“So? Anger won’t give you magic powers!”
“But Zoffner… Kay…”
“In here!” Norma steered her sideways and all but shoved her through the door of the large teaching hut. They were plunged into near complete darkness. Even in the countryside, low levels of light gave some shape to the darkness. In here, they were stumbling in blackness with only the grey outlines of the windows for reference.
“What are we going to do?” said Dee.
“We stop. We think. We—”
However stunning the third suggestion was going to be, it was interrupted by the hut doors exploding inwards. Burning matchwood scattered across the room. Two shapes approached out of the darkness, witchfire in their hands. Norma looked down at her feet and then their assailants.
“We stand our ground,” she said with a new confidence.
Dee tensed. Her bladder wanted to empty and her legs wanted to run – even though they clearly didn’t like it – but she did as Norma said and held her ground. Two witches entered the hut. One had hitched up her long skirt and tied it off to one side. She was also barefoot, Dee noticed.
The witch noticed Dee’s gaze. “You try running in heels,” she said.
The other, the one with short orange hair, exclaimed in delight when she saw Norma. “It is you.”
“Miss Faulkner,” said Norma stiffly. “You’ve changed.”
Lesley-Ann put fingers to her cheeks and gave her a dimpled grin like some Forties starlet. “I’ve taken a dip in the fountain of youth. You like it, Norma?”
Norma tilted her head. “I preferred it when you were dead and broken and drowned. It’s a matter of taste.”
Lesley-Ann Faulkner’s expression hardened. “I owe you a long and lingering death.”
“We belong dead,” said Norma and held her file out like a fencing blade.
Lesley-Ann laughed. Both palms raised she unleashed a torrent of witchfire at them. Dee braced herself and prepared to be barbecued alive.
Free of her gag, Sabrina worked her jaw and licked dry lips. Her skin was pale. As Caroline helped her sit upright, it was clear she was very weak. Sabrina could barely raise a hand to gesture at the other beds.
“… Them too…” she sighed.
Caroline gave Shazam the nod and the sequinned witch began moving from bed to bed, untying the bound women.
“Water,” said Sabrina.
Caroline looked about but there were no taps or jugs. There were pouches of saline solution by the bedside, however. Caroline ripped one open, spilling much of it, and offered it to Sabrina.
“It’s going to be a bit salty, sorry.”
Sabrina gulped at it nonetheless. Caroline stared at the drip pouches and cannulae taped to each of Sabrina’s arms. “What the hell’s been going on here?”
Sabrina pushed the water pouch aside. “Ur, she’s been perfecting her technique.”
“What technique?” said Caroline.
“An iron-poor diet for her cattle. Chelation treatment of our blood. The discovery that she can intravenously inject the stuff rather than bathe in it.”
“Who?” said Caroline.
“Elizabeth Báthory?” said Shazam as she worked on another woman’s bonds.
Sabrina nodded.
“What? That maiden-murdering witch Dee mentioned?” said Caroline. “But she must be like hundreds of years old!”
“Ur, four hundred and fifty something,” said Sabrina. “I’d love to see her imp.”
“Her imp?”
Sabrina swallowed weakly. “The older and more wicked the witch, the bigger the imp.”
It was gratifying to see Lesley-Ann Faulkner and her evil barefoot companion as surprised as Dee felt. Lesley-Ann blasted them again but the flame struck an invisible barrier and flowed over and around them in a wide arc.
“That’s dead impressive, Norma,” gasped Dee.
Norma tapped her foot. Dee looked down. There was a large chalk protective circle drawn on the hut floor. “The symbols are very badly drawn,” said Norma, “and I can’t tell if that is meant to be the dread sigil Odegra or an invocation to the Ogdru Jahad. Very sloppy. Probably Miss Knott’s work. Still, it’s holding.”
“So we’re safe in the circle?” said Dee
As if to prove the point, the barefoot witch blasted them again, to no effect.
“Safe from all magic,” said Norma.
“I could throttle you with my bare hands,” said Lesley-Ann.
“You’re welcome to try,” said Norma and gave a flourish with the tip of her file.
The wicked witches exchanged a look. They backed out of the hut, closing the doors behind them.
“Well, that showed them, didn’t it?” said Dee.
There was the loud but flat roar of flame from outside.
“What are they doing?” said Dee.
Flames appeared at the windows, to the left and the right of the door. Fresh flames rapidly appeared at the windows further round.
“They’re burning the hut down around us,” said Norma flatly.
“And the magic circle will protect us?”
Norma’s expression was not reassuring.
Jenny came to in a dark and tumbledown barn-like room. The musty smell in the air, fifty-percent chemical works, fifty-percent abattoir, almost smothered the scent of fresh wood shavings. Jenny was lying on a hard surface, held in place by ropes across her upper thighs and chest. Above her were gloomy rafters and dilapidated tiles. Turning her head to one side, she saw tubs of chemical cleaner stacked on top of rolls of plastic sheeting. Turning the other way, she saw a dusty collection of gas canisters, Caroline’s apple spirits still and a couple of bottles filled with the potent clear liquid.
“Jizz,” she called. “You there?”
“Jizz?” said George from somewhere behind her head. “Is that the name of your imp?”
“Where is he?”
“Mrs d
u Plessis has him in the house.”
“If you hurt him—”
George stepped into view and looked down at her. His eyes were barely visible behind the amber goggles. “I’m not going to hurt him,” he said. “At least not directly.”
“What are you going to do with me?” she asked.
His smile became tight, pained even. “I like you,” he said. The word but didn’t need to be said. It was written large in every syllable.
“And I like you,” she said. “You should let me go.”
“I follow orders,” said George simply. “There are many parts of this job I don’t like.”
“Like being a lackey to a house full of wicked witches?”
“But there are perks.”
“Yeah?”
“I work outside. I get to see the changing seasons. And there’s a quality of life here, a work/life balance that many would envy.”
“Oh, good,” said Jenny, deadpan. “And do you like this bit? The tying up of helpless women?”
He shook his head and Jenny immediately hated him. It was the headshake one might give in response to “Would you like sugar with that?” or “Did you see Eastenders last night?” It was a headshake devoid of doubt; empty of any moral qualms.
“When the girls can’t give blood no more, I have to bring their bodies out here. They don’t weigh a thing. Just skin and bone. I put the body on here and cut it up so it can be divided up evenly between them.”
Mentally skirting the words cut it up for a moment, Jenny asked, “Them? Between who?”
“I forget,” said George, amused. He slipped off his goggles and positioned them over Jenny’s eyes.
A score of creatures looked down at her from the rafters. Hideous, ogreish creatures with monstrous teeth. Bull-headed creatures. Hobgoblins that looked like a five-year old’s drawing of a pig. Some were as gnarled and twisted as rotten trees. Others were slick and ill-formed, like wax figures next to a fire. They were imps, every one of them. Many were as small as Jizzimus but some were notably larger: hulking demon-chimps. But one of them, too large to climb up into the rafters, towered over them all. Its squashed nose sniffed hungrily and a leering smile broke out on its face as it recognised her from their encounter in the dyke.
“That’d be Malunguibus you’re looking at,” said George. “I try not to get on his bad side.”
Jenny understood: she was in the stables. The out of bounds, unstable stable. Where the imps lived, and where George kept the power tools for cutting up wood and such. And the plastic sheeting for the bodies. And the bleach for cleaning up after the imps had eaten their fill. It’s amazing how quickly we get through this stuff, he had said to her.
Jenny suddenly felt quite light-headed. She raised her head as best she could and looked down at her feet.
Yup. She was strapped to a length of wood on top of a mounted table saw. The saw blade was positioned just ahead of her feet, set to slice her neatly up the middle. Well, not so neatly. She imagined there was going to be a lot of blood; and more besides.
The situation would have been a laughable cliché – as hackneyed as being tied to railway tracks or suspended over a pit of crocodiles – if it wasn’t actually happening to her.
George took the googles from her and the imps were invisible once more. She could still feel their presence, their malevolent and hungry gazes.
“I am sorry about this,” said George. “I do like you.”
“You like me but you’re going to watch me fed through a saw?”
“No,” he said. “I’m going to wait outside.”
Waving away a bee that had buzzed into the stable, George reached down for a button. The saw whirred loudly into life. The board beneath her moved forward with almost imperceptible slowness. Jenny yelled at George but he was already hurrying out the door.
Chapter 8 – What a world! What a world!
Kay stood next to Zoffner, both staring at his wrecked ice cream van.
“It’s part of my personal philosophy to avoid any attachment to material goods,” said Zoffner, “but that ice cream van and me, we go back a long way.”
“It could have been worse,” said Kay. “We could have been inside it. I’m impressed you saw what was about to happen and pushed us out in the nick of time.”
“I didn’t foresee these events, sweet young thing, I was reacting to the warning light on the dashboard which normally precedes a major malfunction. Such as this.”
“Well, it wasn’t wrong,” observed Kay.
The van was upside down on the road. Fluid from the engine mingled with melted ice cream to form a greasy puddle. Zoffner approached the open window and dragged out a tub of ice cream which had been miraculously preserved.
“Are you hungry?” asked Kay, slightly incredulous at Zoffner’s skewed priority. “It’s just that, you know, your van has been trashed by an unexplained explosion and we’re standing in the line of fire.”
“I’m not hungry,” smiled Zoffner. “Our industrious friends might be, though.” He waved above his head to indicate a swarm of bees. He opened the ice cream, set it down on the ground and scooped out a tiny chunk with the side of his thumb, holding it aloft. “Come and enjoy, little stripy friends. You look as though you have much to tell us.”
Dee and Norma stood back to back in the burning hut. The heat from the walls was intense and Dee eyed the flames creeping across the ceiling. It wouldn’t take long before the hut collapsed and covered them both in burning debris.
“So, is there a spell for occasions like this?” she asked Norma. “A fire extinguishing spell or a ward for protecting against falling ceiling beams?”
“No, Miss Finch, there is not.”
“That’s a shame,” said Dee, who was quite a master of the understatement at times.
“A witch must use her initiative,” said Norma. “Let us think what we might use. I am in the unfortunate position of not having my handbag. It is outside the circle. What do you have in your pockets?”
Dee felt her way through the contents of both pockets. “I’ve got an emergency biscuit, a pair of reading glasses, four charred acorns—”
“Charred acorns?”
“Yes. I got them from Lesley-Ann Faulkner.”
Norma pointed to the burning door. “Lesley-Ann Faulkner?”
“No.” Dee did her quickest and worst ever impression of a monster tree. “Lesley-Ann Faulkner. They’re kind of full of monster tree energy.” She passed them to Norma. “Would probably only take a small growth spell to nudge them into life. Oh – and I’ve got Sabrina’s lifting rings! Can we use those?”
“We most certainly can,” said Norma. “We will need to apply them to something that will enable us to levitate.”
“Fly out of here, you mean?” Dee was filled with sudden excitement. “Like broomsticks?”
“I’m not sure it has to be broomsticks.”
Dee was already looking around the shed for anything like a broomstick.
“Any over there?” asked Norma. “There’s an unfortunate lack of anything except garden paraphernalia on this side."
“There’s nothing,” said Dee. “Could we make a workbench fly?”
“No,” said Norma firmly, “we need something that we might point and steer. The fabled use of broomsticks is not an accident, I feel.”
“Wait!” Dee closed her eyes as she tried to remember.
“What?”
“In the cupboard. We were doing the amulet challenge and Jenny said—” She dashed over to the smouldering cupboard door and hauled it open. “Ah-hah!”
Kay looked at Zoffner. “Did you get all that?”
Zoffner smiled. “I’ve always been a student of body language rather than linguistic detail. Bees are so expressive. So, we have problems, yeah? Was there something about an aeroplane and a bear? His name is Lucius, yes?”
“Um, no,” said Kay.
“Or Timothy?”
“The bees say that Caroline and Shazam are trapped in
a basement room and Jenny is strapped to a saw table in the stables.”
“Oh. Bummer. A saw table?”
“And the saw is running.”
“That’s all very, Sho, Goldfinger, you exshpect me to talk, isn’t it?”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“But it’s definitely a bummer. And you’re keen to rescue this Jenny even though she’s a wicked witch?” asked Zoffner.
“Hell, yes. She’s a wicked witch, but she’s my friend,” said Kay firmly.
“That’s beautiful,” breathed Zoffner.
“I’m glad you think so.”
“No,” said Zoffner, pointing urgently at an imperious figure hurtling through the sky. “That there! That’s beautiful.”
“I think yours must be easier to steer!” yelled Dee, as she veered dangerously through the top branches of the birch trees edging the lawn. She was riding a petrol-driven hedge strimmer while Norma’s steed was a folded garden parasol: a much sleeker beast. Once the anti-gravity rings had been slipped over both ends of each item, and the command given, the two unlikely vehicles had shot forward. Dee barely had time to angle her ride upward and hold on before it moved. She was now faced with the very real possibility of crashing from the sky in a mess of broken bones if she didn’t quickly get better at handling her new ride.
“Up here!” commanded Norma. Dee wobbled unsteadily as she rose to join Norma. For some reason, the magic rings were also providing power to the strimmer itself, and the hedge-cutter blades whirled behind Dee like an outboard motor.
Dee wobbled even more as a scream heralded a blast of witchfire aimed up at them. Fortunately, it was clear Lesley-Ann Faulkner and her barefooted crony simply didn’t have their range.
“Have you ever ridden a bike or a skateboard?” asked Norma.
Dee was unable to answer for a moment: she was picturing Norma on a skateboard. “Um, a bike. Not recently, mind.”
“Well if you can recall anything of that experience, you will remember that it’s essential to keep your head up and look where you’re going. If you focus on the non-aerodynamic qualities of your broomstick, or indeed on the ground, you will find great difficulty. Head up and eyes forward, Miss Finch!”