by Sally Prue
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
eCopyright
It was the first day back at school after the summer holidays and the playground was full of excited children. Class Three were hopping up and down inside their enormous new school coats, and Classes Four and Five were charging about shouting WE WENT TO THE SEASIDE AND EVERYWHERE SMELLED OF EGGIES! or else huddled in groups comparing hair clips.
But just inside the school gate there was another group of children. They were a bit bigger than the others, but they weren’t excited or running about. These children had pale faces, and eyes that glittered with fear. From time to time a trembling child crept in through the school gate to join them, but not one of them took a single step nearer the school than was absolutely necessary.
One boy was just looking at his watch, as if in some forlorn hope that the hands would start going backwards, when from a long way off there came a rattling. It came closer and closer until a small car came into view. Its bumper was tied on with string, its wings were patched with duct tape, and it was covered in grime and rust.
‘Here comes Rodney,’ said the boy with the watch.
The car stopped by the school gate and one of the doors flapped open. Out of the opening came a large foot. And then another.
All the children, their faces blue with terror, stared at the boy who got out of the car.
Rodney waved a big hand at them.
‘I span round really fast fifty-three times last night,’ he said, proudly. ‘And I still wasn’t sick!’
And then he shouldered his way through the group of children by the gate and strolled happily down towards the school building.
There was a long pause as the children watched Rodney walk away.
‘He’s not scared,’ said Jack, at last.
‘Of course he’s not,’ said Serise grumpily. ‘He’s too stupid to be scared. I bet Rodney’s too stupid to be scared of a charging bull, even. Or a runaway double-decker bus. Or a shark jumping out of the canal with its jaws wide open.’
‘Or a witch,’ said Emily, in a small voice.
Everyone froze. Then they all nodded sadly.
‘The bell will be going soon.’ Anil looked at his watch again. ‘And then we’ll have to go in, won’t we.’
Emily started crying.
‘Four minutes, exactly,’ went on Anil. ‘Three minutes fifty-five seconds. Three minutes fifty—’
Slacker Punchkin put a flabby arm absentmindedly round Anil’s neck and tried to strangle him.
‘The trouble with Rodney is that he doesn’t believe there’s any such thing as witches,’ Slacker said. ‘He’s just like a grown-up that way.’
‘Yes,’ said Serise scornfully. ‘Stupid.’
‘I mean, even my dad said it was silly to worry about a witch,’ went on Slacker.
Winsome rescued Anil. ‘Perhaps it is silly.’
Emily sniffed sadly. ‘But we’ve all seen it,’ she said. ‘Magic, all over the whole school. And we saw how peculiar last year’s Year Six went.’
‘I suppose so,’ agreed Winsome, frowning. ‘But then we never heard any of them actually say my class teacher Miss Broom is a witch, did we?’
‘That’s true,’ said Jack, perking up a bit.
Serise turned on him with contempt. ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘But I’ve heard them say Miss Broom’s a winter vest! and Miss Broom’s a weasel’s nostril!’
Emily started crying again.
‘Yes,’ agreed Anil. ‘Just as if something was stopping them saying the word witch. Just as if they were all under some spell which stopped them telling anyone about it.’
Winsome tried to look brave. ‘Well, at least year’s Year Six all survived, didn’t they? I mean, they didn’t end up turned into toadstools or piglets or anything.’
There was a short pause.
‘Although we never did find out where all those rhinoceroses came from that were out in the playing field that day,’ Anil pointed out.
Jack suddenly grinned.
‘Hey, it’d be brilliant to be a rhino,’ he said. ‘If I was a rhino I’d charge right through the Co-op spearing doughnuts on my horn and no one would be able to stop me.’
‘Oh yes they would,’ snapped Serise. ‘Someone would shoot you.’
Anil looked at his watch again. ‘It’s nearly time for the bell,’ he said. ‘Ten...nine...’
‘No they wouldn’t!’ said Jack. ‘Rhinos have armour-plated skin, don’t they? And anyway they’re really rare so you’re not allowed to shoot them, not even if they charge right into car parks and start crushing all the cars with their enormous great feet, and—’
‘...two...one...’
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGG GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!
All the children jumped several centimetres into the air and clutched at each other in terror, and several of them screamed.
Slacker Punchkin shook his head sadly.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘There’s no escape, now. We’re doomed.’
Emily began jumping up and down.
‘I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die!’ she shrieked, but Winsome put her arm round her.
‘You’ll be all right,’ Winsome said. ‘Miss Broom would be sent to prison if she did anything bad to us. You know that really. Come on.’
The rest of Class Six looked at each other, and the sound of their knocking knees could be heard even above the chattering of all the other classes as they filed into school.
And then Class Six sighed, and they slowly and reluctantly began to trudge down the school path towards their new classroom.
And towards their new teacher, Miss Broom.
The witch.
Miss Broom didn’t actually look that much like a witch. Instead of being as tall as a drainpipe and as thin as a stick insect she was shortish and had big bosoms. Her face wasn’t green, her teeth weren’t black, and her nose wasn’t warty, either. She didn’t even have a beard.
‘I expect she shaves it off every morning,’ whispered Serise to Jack, behind her hand.
Miss Broom turned to the whiteboard and wrote:
Miss Wilhelmina Broom
in big letters, and Class Six took the opportunity to have a good look at her back. She showed no signs of having a tail, and her hair wasn’t witchy, either: it was bouncy and sand-coloured instead of all black and jagged.
It was only her eyes, really, that gave the game away. They were shining amber like a tiger’s, and when you looked into them, instead of seeing your own reflection, you might see anything: a full moon rising over a graveyard; a flock of fanged bats; a cauldron simmering by candlelight; a knitted tea cosy—
‘A knitted tea-cosy?’ Anil had echoed incredulously, earlier, when Class Six had been comparing notes. ‘Are you sure, Emily?’
‘I suppose it might have been a woolly hat,’ Emily had admitted timidly.
‘You mean, like a football hat?’ Jack had said. ‘Hey, what colour?’
Emily had looked even unhappier.
‘United’s colours,’ she’d whispered.
Everyone had exchanged appalled glances, and Anil had shaken his head.
‘Being a witch is one thing,’ he’d said, trying to be
fair. ‘I mean, you probably can’t help being a witch, any more than I can help being really good at maths. But supporting United...’
And that had been the moment when Class Six had really truly and utterly believed that they were doomed.
Miss Broom turned back from the whiteboard and smiled at all the children. It was a strange, creepy sort of smile that made everyone feel as if spiders were running down their backs towards their underpants, but at least Miss Broom didn’t appear to have fangs.
‘Well, aren’t you sitting nice and quietly,’ said Miss Broom. ‘Now, let’s find out all your names.’
And she began to call the register.
Six small owls emerged from a hole in the front of her desk while she was reading out the names. They flew low over the children’s heads and perched along the top of the bookshelves. The owls had bright amber eyes just like Miss Broom, but the pictures in their enormous eyes showed beetles and bats and mice.
Half-eaten beetles and bats and mice.
Class Six tottered pale-faced out into the playground at break time and stood in a trembling group, too shattered even to think about playing. They were too shattered to speak, too. They stood, completely silent except for a strange slurping, crunching sound behind them like the turning of a badly rusted washing machine.
But that was only Slacker Punchkin eating his breaktime snack of three meat pasties, so they were used to it.
At last Winsome took a deep brave breath.
‘At least we’re alive,’ she said.
‘We are for now,’ said Serise dourly. ‘But who knows if we’ll be alive by lunch time. We’ve been at School Assembly ever since registration. By lunch time Miss Broom might have turned us into gerbils.’
‘Lamp posts.’
‘Pies.’
‘Zombies. Or mummies.’
‘Not mummies,’ said Slacker, spraying Class Six with pie crumbs. ‘She’d never find enough bandages to wrap me up.’
Rodney was looking at them as if they were mad. ‘That’s stupid. There’s no such things as witches. You all know that. Miss Broom’s just an ordinary boring old teacher.’
And now it was Anil’s turn to stare at Rodney as if he was mad. But that was fair enough.
‘What?’ Anil said. ‘So where do you think all those owls came from? And that shower of bus tickets?’
‘The owls came out of a hole in her desk,’ Rodney answered. ‘You don’t have to be a witch to keep pets, do you? My nan’s got a ferret. And the bus tickets probably...’ He frowned for a moment, thinking hard, and then his face brightened. ‘The bus tickets probably came off a bus!’ he finished up, triumphantly.
‘And where do you suppose the bus tickets all went, Rodney?’ asked Winsome, quite kindly. ‘I mean, once they’d stopped flying round the classroom like jet-powered moths and singing that really high-pitched little song about always trusting Miss Broom and always doing as we were told?’
Rodney shrugged. ‘That was just an optical delusion.’
‘And so were all the gibbons,’ said Serise scathingly. ‘And the thunder and lightning coming out of the art cupboard.’
Rodney pulled up two bunches of scraggy weeds from the flowerbed behind him, rolled them up carefully, and stuck them in his ears.
That was the sort of thing he did all the time. No one knew why. Least of all Rodney.
‘There’s no such thing as witches,’ he said stubbornly. ‘And I bet I can prove it, too. All we have to do is make Miss Broom really annoyed, and if we don’t get turned into toadstools then we’ll know she’s not a witch.’
The bell went for the end of break. Jack screamed and jumped so violently he ended up with his arms and legs wrapped round one of the netball posts.
‘That’s it,’ said Serise grimly. ‘We are so going to be dead.’
‘Well, at least if Rodney goes and annoys Miss Broom then he’ll be dead first,’ pointed out Anil, as they went to line up. ‘That’s something.’
But Winsome, who was very kind and sensible, pulled the bunches of weeds out of Rodney’s ear holes.
‘I think you’d best be good, Rodney,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Jack, flapping his fingers between horror and a sort of dreadful delight. ‘Go on, Rodney! You prove to us all that Miss Broom is just an ordinary human and not a witch, and that all those sardines that Emily found in her drawer had swum there by themselves during the holidays.’
Rodney smiled happily. Not only was he easily the stupidest person in the class, he was probably the most obstinate, too. And the least able to recognise a really, really bad idea when he heard one.
‘All right, then,’ he said, and led the way back to class.
Miss Broom wasn’t in the classroom when Class Six arrived. The children looked round anxiously, checking for sharks in the sink and ghosts hanging from the coat hooks, but everything looked more or less normal. Even Emily’s drawer, once she’d bribed Slacker to open it for her by promising him her pudding at lunch time, proved to contain nothing more than her pencil case and some exercise books.
‘I think there’s still a smell of fish, though,’ she said, sniffing cautiously.
Slacker Punchkin gave Emily’s English book a big fat lick.
‘No taste, though,’ he reported, with regret.
Jack was whispering excitedly to Rodney. ‘What are you going to do to prove Miss Broom’s not a witch?’ he asked. ‘What are you going to do? Hey? What are you going to do?’
Rodney frowned and began twisting at one of his ears. He always did that when he tried thinking. The others had decided his brain must be clockwork, and needed winding up to make it work.
‘She can’t be a witch,’ he said. ‘There’s no such thing as witches.’
Anil clutched at his hair in disbelief.
‘Then what about all those spider webs in the rafters?’ he yelped. ‘The ones with our names woven into them? And what about when all our chairs turned into ponies and carried us round the classroom so we were sitting in alphabetical order?’
‘What about that lizard playing Magic Moments on all those cucumbers that grew out of the bottom of the whiteboard?’ asked Winsome.
Rodney shrugged.
‘Like I said, those were just sceptical illusions,’ he said. ‘Anyway, if Miss Broom was a witch she’d have a broomstick, wouldn’t she? And she comes to school on a bicycle.’
‘Yes, she does,’ agreed Anil. ‘A bicycle which goes along by itself without being pedalled. And has ears.’
‘Anyway, you don’t know she hasn’t got a broom,’ pointed out Slacker Punchkin. ‘She could have one at home. Or hidden somewhere.’
Everyone looked around the classroom.
‘It could be in that big cupboard that’s got DANGER written on the door,’ said Jack. ‘Hey, look, the door’s not closed properly. That bit of black material’s got caught in it and it’s stopping it shutting.’
Class Six stared at the door, and they stared at the DANGER sign. The cupboard was big enough to hold all sorts of things. A bear. A full-sized knight in shining armour.
‘A cauldron and a book of spells,’ said Emily, shuddering.
Slacker Punchkin looked interested.
‘A cauldron?’ he echoed. ‘In there? Hey, I wonder if Miss Broom’s cooking anything?’
‘No,’ said Winsome quickly. ‘She couldn’t be. Not in a closed cupboard.’
Rodney heaved a great sigh.
‘But there can’t be a cauldron in the cupboard,’ he said. ‘Because there’s no such thing as magic. Look, I’ll show you.’
Before anyone could stop him he went over to the cupboard door and flung it open wide.
And everyone gasped.
Emily had been right. On the floor inside the cupboard was a small but definite cauldron. It was full of stuff that looked like turquoise bubble gum, and it was bubbling away in spite of the fact there was no fire underneath it. The steam that swelled out into the classroom smelled of old plimsolls, peanuts and
school dinners.
Emily pointed a trembling finger.
‘Look,’ she whispered.
On a hook on the inside of the door was something like an enormous bat skin.
‘A witch’s cloak!’ gasped Winsome.
‘With claws,’ said Anil, with a gulp.
Rodney put out a finger to scoop up some of the turquoise gunge from the cauldron, but Winsome ran over and grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t touch it!’ she said. ‘That’s probably a spell! If you touch that, anything could happen. You could turn into a toad, and then you’d only be able to eat slugs and beetles.’
The others found they’d got up and were moving forward towards the cupboard almost without wanting to, as if their feet had developed minds of their own.
Slacker Punchkin licked his lips.
‘I bet slugs are really juicy,’ he said, as Winsome tried to get Rodney to come away from the cupboard.
‘We’d better close the door and go and sit down,’ she said. ‘Miss Broom will be here any minute and—’
‘Look at that!’ squawked Serise.
They all looked, and now their eyes had got used to the gloom inside the cupboard, they could see it. Beyond the shifting turquoise steam that rose from the cauldron there was something hanging up on the back wall of the cupboard.
It was a hat.
The cloak hadn’t really looked all that different from the gowns teachers wear in cartoons, but there was no doubt about the hat. It was black, it had a broad rim, and the bit in the middle came up to a point.
‘That proves it!’ breathed Jack. ‘That’s a real witch’s hat. It couldn’t possibly be anything else.’
But Rodney only hunched his shoulders.
‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ he said. ‘It’s probably fancy dress. I expect—’
‘Quick!’ squeaked Emily. There were footsteps just outside the door. ‘She’s coming! She’s coming!’
Everyone moved fast. Even Slacker Punchkin moved fast, charging across the classroom, scattering tables and chairs as he went. By the time Miss Broom’s splendid bosom appeared in the doorway Class Six was sitting, arms folded, looking as innocent as they could.
Except for one of them.
Rodney Wright’s clockwork brain just wasn’t fast enough for emergencies, and the children saw to their horror that Rodney was still standing in the cupboard doorway winding up his ear.
