S.N.O.T.

by Nichol Williams

  ‘Do you really think it’s true then?’ Monty asked.

  ‘No doubt about it. He was nearly bankrupt a few months ago but if the Wizards Council doesn’t have enough evidence at the moment it’ll watch him until he makes a mistake and then,’ he made a snatching motion adding in a wise voice, ‘no amount of money will save him.’ Suddenly clapping his hands together and rubbing them he chirped enthusiastically, ‘Great dinners here,’ as a flock of Kobolds entered through the doorway carrying trays stacked with food above their heads.

  ‘Fancy a bit of flying later?’ Monty asked Jebediah as they ate.

  ‘No, I’d best copy out the work I missed and to be honest my face is killing me.’

  ‘It’s been killing the rest of us for years,’ Chester said, a smile curling his lip.

  ‘Ha ha, very funny,’ Jebediah replied concentrating, on his food.

  Monty left his parchment as promised and Jebediah sat at the desk under the window in his room and copied out the passages as best he could, the pustules on his hand making it virtually impossible for him to hold his quill properly. He caught sight every now and then of a broom and its rider bobbing past the window. The sun began to fade and dip below the horizon for the evening as the last words flowed from Jebediah’s quill.

  Slumping down on his bed, he removed the jar of cream from his pocket and applied some more. He was heavier handed than Cordelia had been. Yawning, he lay on his back staring at the ceiling’s plasterwork, which had now yellowed through age and was streaked with the odd cobweb, as the shadows lengthened across the room.

  The Letter

  Alex strolled at a leisurely pace up the high street in the quiet, sleepy village of Whipsey to Jebediah’s house, fulfilling his daily chore and promise of walking Rotten.

  He opened the door, the charm previously placed on it having been changed to allow him entry, and picked up the bundle of letters lying on the mat. He carried them into the kitchen and threw them down on the table along with a pile already there. Flicking through, he noticed that some were official communications from the Wizards Council. This was unusual. Jeb’s mum and dad may be a little absent-minded about him but they were on the ball with anything concerning their work which occupied most of their time.

  Popping his head round the living room door he was greeted by an empty room which required a certain amount of tidying up and hoovering. Magazines and papers lay on the floor and cups on the coffee table. Tiptoeing up the stairs, the atmosphere was oddly quiet.

  ‘Rotten!’ he called out, ‘Rotten, come here boy.’

  The familiar sound of Rotten jumping down from Jebediah’s bed could be heard overhead as his claws clipped against the wooden floor. He came running down the stairs, his tail wagging and tongue lolling out of his mouth as he panted from the summer heat.

  ‘Come on boy, let’s go and find that useless Kobold,’ Alex said wearily and patted the dog heartily on the back.

  Continuing up the stairs he shouted out, ‘Grimble, are you here?’

  There was no response and each room he checked in turn was empty. Deep down he hadn’t really expected to find the Kobold cleaning or tidying. Those were chores he neglected every day. Finally he scrambled up the narrow stairs to the attic where a musty stench akin to rotting vegetables hit him like a brick wall.

  Through the dim light from a small window in the roof he saw Grimble lying on his bed surrounded by empty beer bottles and pizza boxes that littered the floor. The place was a total pigsty and it took all his nerve to lean forward and shake the sleeping Kobold.

  ‘Come on you lazy scumbag,’ he muttered.

  Grimble merely grunted and rolled over onto his side, revealing a slice of pepperoni that was stuck to the hairs on his back.

  Standing back up with a look of utter disgust he said to Rotten, ‘Can you drag him down the stairs?’

  The dog whimpered. Its ears flopped down and its tail shot between its legs as it scarpered back down the stairs hastily.

  ‘Fantastic - it’s up to me then,’ he said aloud and gingerly took hold of Grimble’s arms and hauled him down the stairs and into the garden.

  As Grimble was still unconscious, Alex emptied a bottle of washing up liquid over him before turning on the garden hose. A jet of water spurted forth which, mixed with the liquid, caused foam to froth all over the Kobold’s hairy body. It wasn’t long before the cold water brought him to his senses. Spluttering and waving his arms about in an attempt to stem the flow, he shouted a string of foul words.

  Alex decided that he was now not only clean enough but also coherent enough to talk. Throwing him a towel he said, ‘Dry yourself off and then come into the kitchen, I want to talk to you.’

  Grimble narrowed his eyes and bared his teeth like an animal as he rubbed his hairy body dry, remaining silent, however, for fear of another dousing.

  Alex was already sat at the table when the Kobold stepped through the door, leaving wet footprints all over the stone floor.

  ‘Sit down,’ Alex said pointing to the chair opposite.

  The Kobold, still damp, pulled the chair out from the table and sat down, saying as he did so, ‘I don’t ave to do what ye says, ye not mi masta.’

  ‘No you’re right, I’m not,’ Alex replied, ‘but you see that’s why I don’t have any qualms about sticking your head in the food blender.’ This statement was accompanied by a twisted smile. Their eyes met and Grimble had the distinct impression that he was not joking. Sniffing loudly to show his contempt, he folded his scrawny arms and stared ahead mutely.

  Alex ran his fingers over the pile of letters, lifting some of them up before allowing them to drop through his fingers like flour through a sieve.

  ‘What I want to know is the whereabouts of Mr and Mrs Humphries.’

  Grimble continued to stare ahead as he shrugged his shoulders in a defiant manner.

  ‘Grimble, I think something has happened to them - they wouldn’t leave all this post unopened.’ When he still made no attempt to reply Alex continued, ‘You do realise that if anything happens to them you’ll have to find a position somewhere else and as you are the laziest creature in existence, that might be a little difficult.’

  The sound of an honest day’s work frightened the Kobold, and Alex was sure that under the mountain of hair he saw him physically blanch.

  ‘Never came back from work t’other day,’ he said hastily.

  ‘Did they say they were going away anywhere?’

  ‘No, sides, I never ask nowt of mi mastas.’

  Alex sighed and ran his fingers over the letters strewn on the table. ‘There could be a clue in one of these,’ he said picking up one of the letters and ripping it open. He did this with each one in turn only to find that they contained nothing that alluded to their disappearance. The last letter was a piece of stiffly folded parchment. Turning it over and breaking the thick red wax seal he found that it was written in a series of symbols.

  ‘Do you know what this says?’ he asked, passing it across the table to Grimble.

  Grimble shook his head and passed it back. ‘Don’t speak Elfish meeself.’

  Somewhat stumped Alex asked, ‘Do you know anyone who does?’

  Tilting his head to one side he muttered, ‘The old bag might,’ indicating Jebediah’s grandmother.

  Alex jumped up from the table and called out as he fled the room, ‘Stay there, I’ll be back in a minute,’ and dashed out of the house.

  Rapping hard on the white studded door of the grandmother’s cottage, he stood back and waited, tapping the letter in his hand. It felt like a lifetime before she opened it.

  ‘What do you want?’ she snarled, staring at him like he was an insect that had crawled out from under a stone.

  ‘I...I think something has h-happened to Mr and Mrs Humphries,’ he stuttered. ‘Grimble ha
sn’t seen them for days and they didn’t say they were going away anywhere,’ he carried on, rushing the words out so they sounded jumbled.

  ‘So?’ she snapped. ‘What are you telling me for?’

  Alex held out the opened sheet of parchment. ‘Do you speak Elfish?’ he asked anxiously for she was his last hope.

  As she took the letter in her gnarled, nicotine-stained fingers he caught a strong, sickly whiff of lavender water; she virtually bathed in it to cover the stench of mistletoe liqueur. Mouthing the words silently, she translated the symbols written in her mind. Thrusting the letter back at him she said, ‘They’ve gone and got themselves kidnapped by some Ogres.’ Taking a step back she began to close the door.

  Alex, too stunned to speak, instinctively leapt forward, putting his foot in the doorway and preventing her from closing it. This enraged the old lady so much that she started to slam it repeatedly, crushing his foot.

  Through the agonising pain he managed to splutter, ‘We need… to… help them.’

  ‘Ha!’ she cried. ‘You can if you want, but I’m staying here, Coronation Street will be on in a minute.’ With that she prodded him in the eye with her wand and slammed the door shut, leaving Alex writhing on the pavement.

  Hobbling back into Jebediah’s house he slouched on the chair at the kitchen table. Grimble smiled sadistically at his obvious discomfort.

  Through the tears that streamed down his face from his injured eye he explained, ‘They’ve been kidnapped by a group of Ogres.’

  ‘That so,’ Grimble said slowly with indifference.

  ‘Yeah, and she isn’t even prepared to help,’ he declared angrily, slapping the letter down on the table. ‘So that only leaves Jeb.’

  ‘Oh,’ Grimble mumbled, ‘I’d better start looking for another job then.’

  From Bike Rides to Liverpool

  Jebediah slept right through until morning and awoke fully clothed in exactly the same position in which he had fallen asleep. Undressing, he grabbed a quick wash and dashed down for breakfast where he found Thomas and Chester finishing off a fried breakfast.

  Pulling out a chair next to Chester he slumped down.

  ‘With the land of the living are you?’ Chester asked, beckoning over a passing Kobold and filling a plate with bacon, eggs and sausages for Jebediah. ‘Here get this down your neck.’

  ‘I feel like I’ve been trampled by a herd of Sleipnir horses,’ he said, cutting the bacon and dipping it into the golden yellow yolk, sending it spilling onto the plate.

  ‘It’s the poison from the Bugleweed,’ Chester informed him knowingly as he polished off the last sausage on his plate. ‘Same thing happened to me when I was about five. I was staying with my gran and granddad and I had decided to go and explore the stream at the bottom of their garden.’

  ‘Miss Johnson gave me some ointment to put on my face. She said they’d disappear in a few days.’

  ‘They will, but be careful not to burst any. The pus stains everything it comes into contact with, even skin,’ Chester warned.

  Lessons throughout the morning had proved difficult. Palmistry was hopeless as he had far too many spots on his hand to be able to see his lifeline let alone his career line. He couldn’t concentrate long enough on his spells during Invisibility to disappear successfully as his face was itching like crazy.

  The afternoon’s lesson on crystals was taken by Violet Storm, one of the few teachers about whom everyone had something good to say. In her late twenties, she was one of the youngest they had. She had come from America on an exchange programme to study Water Dragons and decided to stay. Sporting short black spiky hair, her fashionably cut robes were a deep sapphire blue and her boots were purple with lavender laces.

  Everyone sat down in a semicircle at their desks encompassing Miss Storm’s own cluttered one. They were using a room which he supposed was normally used as a drawing room as tables and easy chairs were dotted about and pictures of country scenes lined the walls.

  Miss Storm had every single type of crystal known. They glinted and shimmered in the light, sending patterns of colours flickering around the floors and walls like a kaleidoscope.

  Once she had handed out a sheet of parchment to each student, Jebediah read the first question: 1. What stone is commonly known as the stone of friendship? He glanced across to where Cordelia sat and saw her face grow visibly paler as she scanned down the sheet. Crystals were not her strongest subject despite her parents owning the largest shop in Britain.

  ‘Have you seen this one?’ Monty asked pointing to question number five. ‘What stone helps strengthen the immune system and dissolves aches and pains?’ he continued, pulling a face.

  Violet Storm ran her eyes over the class and noted the expressions of worry on some of their faces. ‘Don’t panic, this isn’t a test. I merely want to see what standard you are at so I can tailor my lessons to suit everyone’s ability,’ she announced with a distinct American twang.

  An audible sigh of relief rippled round the students and the tense lines on Cordelia’s face softened.

  Jebediah had difficulty holding his quill and in the end his paper looked like a spider had crawled across it in its last violent death throes. The questions, when he looked closer and thought about them, weren’t that bad and after he’d finished he was sure that he’d answered at least three-quarters of them correctly.

  Collecting in the papers Miss Storm announced, ‘I will mark these tonight and if you want to know your result I will tell you individually in our next lesson.’

  The remaining twenty minutes of the lesson were devoted to familiarising themselves again with how crystals were formed and which were the rarest. Some of them were the size of boulders while others were no bigger than a fingernail. Jebediah rubbed between his fingers and thumb a pale blue Larimar stone that they had been taught was called The Stone of Atlantis. Its smooth contours brought a calm feeling to him but not the inspiration, imagination or understanding it was said to do.

  Mr Pirbright, a stocky Welshman, took pity on Jebediah and allowed him to sit out of flying until his hand had healed. He watched the others as they soared through the air. Monty, as usual, was showing off while four of the girls had decided to do a bit of synchronised flying. They swooped round in circles, their arms waving gracefully like ballet dancers.

  After tea Jebediah accepted Cordelia’s offer of going for a walk. It was still swelteringly hot with very little breeze to ease the uncomfortable stickiness, but welcome all the same after being cooped up nearly all day indoors.

  Many of the students had had the same idea. Some of the older ones were lounging in groups under the beckoning shade of weeping willow trees reading large dusty volumes while others sat discussing their forthcoming exam with a mixture of excitement and trepidation in their voices and on their faces.

  Jebediah looked up into the sky just in time to see an Imp swoop down and almost clip his hair on the grass as he attempted a rather intricate roll for the amusement of his friends. No doubt it would lead to a broken bone of some description.

  The formal gardens were laid out geometrically with flowers in a riot of colours; blues, oranges, vivid yellows and startling pinks vied with one another for pride of place. Their scent hung in the air, assailing them as they walked along the paths.

  Sitting down on the edge of an enormous fountain in the form of Pan which spurted water from his pipes, Cordelia asked, ‘Have you been using that cream Miss Johnson gave you?’

  Dipping the tips of her fingers in the cool water she swirled it about.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jebediah replied gently touching his face. ‘I think some of them are already starting to go down,’ he said enthusiastically.

  Cordelia was careful not to pull a face and shatter his allusions. She made an ‘Ummm’ sound as though in agreement but without actually saying as much.

&n
bsp; Flicking the water about absently, splatters flew onto the ledge where they rested for a few seconds before seeping into the stone.

  ‘We’ve got Transformations tomorrow,’ she said, turning up the cuff of her robe where it had become wet. ‘I wouldn’t mind having a bit of a practice.’

  Jebediah scowled. ‘When you say practice you’re not intending to use me as your guinea pig, are you?’ he enquired cautiously.

  Cordelia turned to face him, an expression of deep thought on her face. Finally she said slowly and deliberately, ‘I don’t think you’d suit being a guinea pig - maybe a ferret.’

  ‘Eh you,’ Jebediah shouted and lunged at her. He wasn’t fast enough and, with the agility of a cat, Cordelia leapt off the fountain and sprinted off into the distance. He finally managed to catch up with her as they rounded the west wing of the house by the greenhouse, Cordelia insisting that she had slowed down purely because she felt sorry for him.

  Crossing the gravel driveway, they were both out of breath when Monty came running up.

  ‘Jebediah, my old man, there’s someone here who insists on speaking to you urgently.’

  ‘Someone to see me?’ he repeated in bewilderment. He couldn’t imagine his parents taking time out of their busy work schedule to visit him for any reason.

  ‘He’s just outside the main gates,’ Monty explained falling into step beside them both.

  ‘Did he say who he was or what he wanted?’ Jebediah asked, still trying to figure out who it was that had come to see him.

  ‘No, just that it is imperative that he speaks to you, and to be honest he looks like he’s been through the mill a bit if you ask me.’

  Rounding the corner he saw someone crouched down on the ground by the grass verge, their head covered by their arms which rested on their knees while a small, pink, girl’s bicycle with purple and white ribbons dangling from the handle bars lay by the side of him. As they drew closer, the sound of their feet crunching the gravel beneath caused the person Monty had described to look up.