The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner: And Other Stories

by Terry Pratchett

He puffed up to the bank just as Rupert and Dai were escaping on their getaway bicycles.

  But Lord Cake had heard the commotion too, and he knew it could mean only one thing. Sooner than it takes to tell, he and his men were cycling madly in pursuit of our heroes.

  ‘We’ll take a short cut and head them off at the library!’ he bawled.

  Faster went Rupert and Dai, but Cake and his cronies were gaining on them.

  Up Banwen’s Beacon they went, and whizzed back up the High Street to the Assay Office.

  ‘Here is the map,’ panted Rupert, throwing it over the counter. ‘It proves that Banwen’s Beacon doesn’t belong to anyone.’

  ‘It belongs to the whole village,’ puffed Dai.

  Lord Cake came wobbling in, very out of breath, but a crowd of miners rushed up and caught him by his coat. Up came PC Hodgkins too.

  ‘You haven’t robbed any banks today, by any chance?’ he said, looking closely at Rupert.

  ‘Absolutely not. Really. A masked man dropped this from his bicycle,’ said Rupert, who had stuffed his mask into his pocket. ‘But arrest that man for forgery and claim jumping. And riding a bike without a bell, now I come to think of it.’

  So all the miners were able to go up on Banwen’s Beacon and each was able to mine his own mine.

  And that was how the Great Coal Rush started.

  THE TIME-TRAVELLING TELEVISION

  Odd things happened in Blackbury. Things like this . . .

  One bright Friday morning only a few years ago a man in a bright yellow jacket and safety helmet came to see Professor Miriam Oxford, curator of the Blackbury Museum.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, ‘I’m Fred Robertson, and I’m the foreman up at the Sand and Gravel Quarry on Even Moor. We thought you’d like to see this.’

  He opened the bag he was carrying and plonked a huge great fossil shell on the professor’s desk. (The fossil was one of those curly ones, like a snail shell.)

  ‘What a fine specimen!’ said Professor Oxford.

  ‘Yes, but you listen to it,’ said Fred.

  ‘Listen to it? Oh, you mean like we used to do with the seashells when we were kids? Well, that’s a lot of nonsense, really.’

  But Professor Oxford listened. Now, if you put a seashell to your ear you hear the sound of the sea. You know that. So if it’s a fossilized seashell you can hear the sound of the sea as it was millions of years ago, when the waves broke on strange and curious seashores. And the professor heard the ancient sea, and the puffing and grunting of reptiles on the shore, and the cries of things which surely couldn’t have been seagulls.

  ‘You listen on,’ said Fred. ‘You ain’t heard nothing yet.’

  With her mouth open the professor went on listening. And above the pounding of the surf she heard a voice, singing ‘Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?’fn1

  She began to sing along with the voice:

  ‘He’s as bad as old Antonio,

  Left me on my own-ee-o,

  Has anybody here seen Kelly?

  Kelly from the Isle—’

  She stopped, remembering how she couldn’t really sing very well.fn2 ‘Incredible!’ she said.

  ‘That’s what we all thought,’ said Fred. ‘Sometimes he sings, and sometimes he whistles. That’s not all we found. Look here.’ He produced a pair of fossilized sunglasses, and a fossilized copy of the BLACKBURY AND WEST GRITSHIRE GAZETTE dated next Monday. The paper was hard as a lump of slate, but you could still just make out the writing.

  ‘They were with the shell,’ said Fred.

  ‘Well, I’ve never—’ began the professor.

  There was suddenly a terrific commotion in the street outside. There was a prehistoric monster walking down the High Street! It was slightly transparent – walking through things without harming them – but of course, that’s no great consolation. It was only there for a few minutes before it went fuzzy and vanished.

  ‘Hmm, a triceratops,’ said the professor. ‘A harmless herbivore – it eats veg, I mean. What’s going on?’

  After that first day some very odd things started to happen around Blackbury. There was the static electricity, for one thing. It didn’t hurt anybody, but everything in the town sometimes hummed and crackled as though it was in a thunderstorm. And several times ghostly prehistoric monsters wandered through the town as if it wasn’t there, like great big ghosts.

  And sometimes from the fossilized seashell on Professor Oxford’s desk would come the voice of someone singing ‘Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?’ on an ancient and far-off seashore.

  The professor called a special meeting.

  ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ she said. ‘The fossilized newspaper we found proved it. Someone has gone back in time millions of years, probably to where the Sand and Gravel Quarry is now. You’ve found some other fossils, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fred Robertson, the site foreman. ‘Yesterday we found a fossilized deckchair. This bloke must have left it there. But the oddest thing is up at the site. You’d better come and look.’

  They went up to the quarry on the mysterious Even Moor – and there they saw the seashore.

  Millions of years before there had been a muddy sea over most of what was now South Gritshire, and the shore had come up to Even Moor. Then it had hardened into stone. It was quite usual for quarry workers to find dinosaur footprints in it. But what Fred pointed out was the fossilized footprint of a left-hand wellington boot.

  ‘That settles it,’ said Miriam Oxford. ‘Someone from our time has discovered some kind of time-travel. Just think of the possibilities for science! We’ve got to find them!’ She stared around. There was only one house near the quarry.

  ‘That belongs to old Bill Posters,’ said Fred. ‘He’s an old-age pensioner. I shouldn’t think he knows anything about this. He collects butterflies, you know.’

  ‘Hush!’ hissed the professor.

  From the cottage suddenly came the sound of someone whistling a familiar tune – ‘Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?’

  ‘It’s him!’ shouted the professor, dashing towards the cottage and banging on the door. Immediately her hair stood on end and blue sparks flashed from her fingers.

  Then she realized that the door wasn’t really locked. Inside, the cottage was dark and rather dusty and full of ornaments. An old-fashioned television was on in the corner, but its screen was all crackly and fuzzy, as though it wasn’t tuned in properly. There were the remains of someone’s breakfast – a boiled egg – on the table, and a white cat was dozing in front of the fire.

  Professor Oxford stormed around the house. There was no one there. Then she heard the singing again. It seemed to be coming from outside the back door this time, so she wrenched it open – and stepped out into blazing sunlight.

  She was standing on a beach of orange sand.

  A sluggish, muddy sea broke on the shore, and in the yellow sky the sun looked white and bigger than usual. There were grey cliffs in the distance and, not far from the shore, something big and finny was wallowing in the sea.

  The professor still had her hand on the door handle. She hurriedly stepped back, slammed the door behind her and then leaned against it.

  ‘Now, I must think slowly about this,’ she said to herself. ‘Here is a kitchen. It’s musty and rather dark, and this is the twenty-first century, and this is twenty-one miles from the sea.’

  She opened the door a crack. Where the grey fields of Even Moor should have been the sea was still rolling in.

  ‘But that looks very much like millions of years ago,’ she said in wonder.

  ‘I say! Hello there!’ shouted a man who was paddling in the sea. He had his trousers rolled up to his knees, a handkerchief knotted on his head and a butterfly net in his hand.

  Professor Oxford stepped through the door again, and onto the sand. The man with the butterfly net came trotting towards her and shook her hand.

  ‘Well well well,’ he said. ‘Do you know, you’re the first person I’ve seen f
or days!’

  ‘You must be Bill Posters,’ said the professor.

  ‘That’s me!’ said Bill Posters. ‘I say, there’s some yellow butterflies over here with wings almost a metre across – very odd.’

  As they walked across the sand, the professor gazed intently at lizards and shells, and at last she said: ‘This proves it. Your back door somehow opens onto a beach several hundred million years ago! I doubt if there are even any dinosaurs yet.’

  ‘Amazing,’ said Bill Posters. ‘You know, I’ve wondered a bit myself. I thought at first this was some kind of South Sea island.’

  A giant blue and green dragonfly swooped overhead.

  ‘It’s my old television that caused this, I think,’ said Bill. ‘Did you see it on when you went indoors? There was a sizzling noise in it the other week and now every time you switch it on you get all this’ – he waved an arm at the sea, sand and yellow sky – ‘just outside the back door.’

  A small blue beetle trotted over the sand. The sun was very hot.

  ‘Of course, if anyone was to switch it off while we were here we could be stuck,’ said Bill Posters conversationally.

  They glanced back at the hazy outline of the cottage on the beach. And inside, as the worried men from the quarry came in to look for the professor, one of them turned the fuzzy television off. The cottage disappeared.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Bill Posters.

  Well, at first it wasn’t too bad. They made a fire out of dried seaweed and ferns, and scraped giant limpets off the rocks to make a fish stew which was really rather good. The sun set and the stars came out – and they were a lot brighter and quite different from the ones we get today. Bill sang his favourite song again, and they fell into a peaceful sleep.

  Next morning they thought they had better explore in case there were any dangerous animals around. The great young sun blazed down as they strolled along the beach, and odd winged lizards whizzed overhead. Everything was very fresh and new. Out in the sea curious sea creatures snorted and splashed.

  ‘This would be just the place to retire to,’ said Bill Posters.

  The professor grunted. She was really more interested in filling her pockets with shells and stones and bits of grass and thinking of the enormously interesting scientific things she’d be able to do if ever she got back to Blackbury University.

  Around lunch time they clambered over some rocks at the end of the bay and Bill Posters wiped his brow and said, ‘I’d really like a glass of lemonade about now.’

  And in front of them they saw, up against a grey cliff, a pub. It was thatched. Roses grew around the door. There was a painted sign in front of it which said THE DOG AND DINOSAUR.

  ‘It’s the sun,’ said Professor Oxford. ‘It’s affecting our heads. That is a figment of our imagination.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to have a figment of iced lemonade,’ said Bill, and set off at a trot.

  Inside the Dog and Dinosaur it was cool and dim, and a little man in a white coat was polishing glasses behind the bar.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said conversationally. ‘Another lovely day. Of course, it always is here. When are you from?’

  The professor and Bill Posters looked out at the grey sea and the big young sun.

  ‘Er . . . what do you mean, when are we from?’ asked the professor after a pause.

  The barman of the Dog and Dinosaur said, ‘Don’t you know? How did you get here? Wonky television method, I suppose. Oh. Here, you’re not Bill Posters, are you?’

  Bill said ‘Yes’ because things had got beyond him.

  The barman grinned, and shook their hands. Then he explained how Bill’s discovery that a wonky television could produce time-travelling had become world famous. And once the doors to time-travel were opened, why, everyone wanted to have a go too.

  He himself was from 2055, said the barman, and by his time millions of people were time-travelling. That was why he had opened his pub in the Carbonaceous Age.

  ‘Most people spend their holidays in the Jurassic Period,’ he added. ‘The dinosaurs, you know. Interesting. Very popular.fn3 We really get more senior citizens here, like your good old selves. It’s so peaceful. Nothing much is due to happen on this stretch of seashore for another million years.’

  ‘I say, can you get us back home?’ asked the professor.

  ‘Of course,’ said the barman. ‘But come back soon. Bring some friends!’ He twiddled a dial on a shelf, there was a slight zipppp! and the familiar outline of Even Moor, all grey and heathery, appeared in a doorway.

  A moment after they stepped through they were alone. And then they were back in Bill’s kitchen.

  Well, everything that happened next had to happen. Soon a party of scientists from Blackbury University were studying Bill’s wonky television to find out how the time-travelling worked. Miriam Oxford spent a lot of time on news programmes too, explaining it all.

  And Bill Posters?

  He disappeared mysteriously, leaving a little note that only the professor understood. It said:

  THE BLACKBURY PARK STATUES

  Back in the day, Blackbury Park (NO SINGING, DANCING OR RIDING, BY ORDER) was closed every night at six o’clock with a big green padlock.

  It was dark and lonely inside. Shadows lurked among the rhododendron bushes, played across the silent waters of the boating lake and hung between the flower beds.

  ‘Go on, push off, you great booby!’

  The voice came from a statue on a pedestal, in a clump of rhododendrons by the lake. A bronze plaque said it was of Lord Palmerston. The statue – a Victorian-looking man in early trousers and frock coat – was flailing wildly at a pigeon with a marble scroll.

  ‘Go away! Get off! You ought to be in a pie!’

  The statue jumped down from his pedestal and clumped heavily to the pool edge, where he removed his boots and cooled his feet in the dark water, with a sigh of relief.

  All over the park the other statues were waking up. There was a neigh as General Sir George Balaclava, horse and all, leaped down from his plinth and cantered across the lawns. Sir Harold Pincer, cast in bronze, strolled pompously past. A couple of marble water nymphs picked flowers; a lion, carved in millstone grit, stood up and shook his mane.

  Soon the park was alive with movement, the air filled with talking and laughter. In the middle of it all sat Lord Palmerston, soaking his feet.

  ‘She wasn’t there again today, Leo,’ he said, as the lion padded up. ‘I’m getting worried. It’s been nearly a week now.’

  ‘That’s odd. She even comes here at Christmas time,’ growled the lion.

  ‘Who’s this?’ asked a bronze nymph, who lived at the other side of the park.

  ‘Mrs Mince,’ said Lord Palmerston. ‘The old lady who comes in to feed the ducks of a morning. She’s been coming to the park ever since I remember – even when she was a little girl. There were only a few of us here in those days,’ he added wistfully.

  ‘She used to come courting here with that young man what got killed in the war – the first one,’ said the lion.

  ‘Then she married that fellow from East Slate,’ said Lord Palmerston.

  By now quite a crowd had gathered.

  ‘She used to bring her kids in to play,’ said General Sir George Balaclava, whose plinth overlooked the children’s playground.

  ‘And her grandchildren,’ said Sir Harold Pincer.

  ‘She must be very, very old now,’ said Lord Palmerston, drying his feet on the lion’s mane. ‘I hope nothing’s happened to her.’

  ‘Does anyone know where she lives?’ asked Sir George.

  ‘Number seven, Mafeking Terrace,’ said the lion. ‘I heard her talking about it to someone once.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that we go and look?’ asked Lord Palmerston. ‘That’s risky. Still . . . she has been here thousands of times. Let’s wait until tomorrow. She might come back.’

  All the next day the statues in Blackbury Park waited for Mrs Mince. They stood as still
as – well, statues – watching the visitors, but there was no sign of the old lady.

  As soon as the gate was locked for the night Lord Palmerston jumped down from his pedestal.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘who’s going to come with me to Mafeking Terrace?’

  ‘It ought to be me,’ said bronze Sir George Balaclava. ‘I’ve got a horse.’

  ‘Then take me too,’ said Lord Palmerston, and a couple of water nymphs helped him onto the metal horse. ‘How are we going to get out?’ he asked as they cantered off.

  For an answer, Sir George spurred his horse and next moment it was thundering towards the fence.

  It landed on the other side in a shower of sparks.

  ‘Wheee!’ said Sir George. ‘I haven’t enjoyed anything so much since the Battle of Balaclava – where I was shot dead, as I seem to remember.’

  There was no traffic, which was a good thing since they were riding down the middle of the road.

  ‘Here, you don’t think she’s dead?’ said Lord Palmerston after a while.

  ‘That would be all right – they’ll make a statue of her then.’

  ‘You’ve got to be famous or decorative for that, and I don’t think she was really either.’

  Sir George reined his horse in by a policeman. ‘We’re looking for Mafeking Terrace, Officer,’ he said. ‘Could you direct us?’

  ‘Just down the street and second on the left,’ said the policeman. ‘That’s a fine horse.’

  ‘Tends to squeak,’ said Sir George, as they rode away.

  They soon found Mafeking Terrace, and Lord Palmerston hammered on the door of number seven. Since he was seven feet high and made of marble this made rather a din, but no one answered.