Cosmo and the Magic Sneeze

by Gwyneth Rees

  Mephisto miaowed back, telling him to wait where he was. No other male cat was allowed inside his garage.

  Jock miaowed something else that Mephisto couldn’t understand. He found it very difficult to follow Jock’s strong Scottish accent. When Mephisto went to the door, Jock beckoned him to the garden. Mephisto followed him, feeling irritated. He hated to be interrupted in the middle of his dinner.

  There was another cat already in the garden. It was Tigger-Louise, the tabby cat who was always hanging around with Jock. She lived in one of the big houses across the other side of the railway track with a young couple who had recently had a baby and constantly felt guilty for giving it more attention than their cat. Because of this, they were always trying to make up for their negligence by spending money on Tigger-Louise, who now had an expensive new collar made of black leather with fake diamond studs. Tigger-Louise was very proud of it indeed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ India asked, following Mephisto into the garden as Cosmo chased after her, trying to catch the end of her tail.

  Jock said a sentence with lots of ‘ochs’ and ‘ayes’ in it, which India couldn’t understand.

  ‘Jock heard Sybil talking to Doris,’ Tigger-Louise translated for them. Tigger-Louise had a better ear for accents than most cats on account of having travelled quite a bit with her humans. ‘Sybil got a recipe for a new spell from her mother today, and Doris nearly had a fit when she read it. She said it was so evil that Sybil would be sent to witch prison if anyone found out about it.’

  ‘What sort of spell is it?’ India asked anxiously.

  Jock couldn’t tell them that because neither witch had said out loud what the spell actually did. But he was looking at Mephisto as if he really pitied him for having such an evil mistress.

  Mephisto had heard enough. Any cat who insulted his mistress, insulted him. Besides, he wasn’t going to be pitied by a scruffy ginger tom who came from a country where all the cats wore kilts. (Mephisto had never been to Scotland and he was rather ignorant about what it was really like there.) ‘Did you actually hear this conversation yourself?’ he demanded of Tigger-Louise, starting to growl.

  ‘No, but Jock came and told me everything straight after.’

  ‘And you can understand Jock perfectly, can you?’

  ‘Well . . . not perfectly, but—’

  ‘Exactly!’ Mephisto spat out crossly. ‘So this is a very unreliable second-hand account of what Sybil and Doris are meant to have said. I think you should check your facts, Tigger-Louise, before you go around spreading gossip!’ Mephisto’s tail was reminded him. ‘Witches can’t afford to be so choosy any more.’

  ‘I’m not jet black either, Father,’ Cosmo piped up, lifting up one of his little white paws.

  Mephisto turned on him. ‘You’re black enough!’ he snarled. ‘And who said you could leave the garage?’

  Cosmo scurried back to finish his dinner as India whispered softly in Mephisto’s ear, ‘I did, actually, dear.’

  Mephisto growled loudly. ‘I’m the head of this family. Sometimes I think you forget that, India.’ And just to show her who was boss, he lifted his tail and sprayed the area around them with his strongest scent.

  4

  India was worried. Mephisto might be too proud to entertain the idea that his mistress could do anything bad, but India thought differently. She knew one of Cosmo’s tasks from now on would be to help Sybil with her spells and she didn’t want him being part of something truly wicked. She decided to enlist Felina’s help. If they could find the spell that Jock had been talking about, Felina would be able to read it and then they would know whether there was anything to worry about or not. India waited until Sybil and Mephisto went out to their weekly cats-and-witches coffee morning together, then she went to fetch the cat professor.

  Ten minutes later, the two cats were cautiously head-butting their way through the had sent. They even knocked over the rubbish bin and searched through that. India was starting to get anxious in case Sybil came back, when Felina called over to her, ‘The thing we are looking for is a recipe, isn’t it?’

  ‘A spell recipe, yes,’ India replied.

  Felina was reading the letters on the front of a large flat book: R-E-C-I-P-E-S. ‘This could be where she keeps it.’ It was the sort of book with blank pages where you wrote or pasted in your own recipes. Felina started to nudge each page over with her nose, hissing as she gave her nose a paper-cut. Paper-cuts were a necessary hazard when you spent as much time with books as the professor cat did, but they still irritated her each time they happened. She turned the pages more carefully, studying each heading, until she came to the last recipe in the book.

  A sheet of black paper was pasted on to the page and the writing on the paper was in green ink. Felina tried to read the heading. She didn’t immediately recognize the first word so she said each letter out loud, then tried to pronounce the word as best she could. ‘Ee-youp-heem-ia,’ was how it sounded when she said it. Then she remembered that in human language, a ‘p’ and an ‘h’ together sounded like an ‘f ’. (She knew this from studying Mephisto’s name.) ‘Ee-you-fee-mia,’ she said.

  ‘Euphemia! That’s the name of Sybil’s mother,’ India said at once. ‘That’s it! That’s the recipe we want!’

  Felina went back and read the whole heading. ‘EUPHEMIA’S SECRET RECIPE.’

  ‘Secret recipe?’ India repeated. ‘That doesn’t tell us much. Read the rest.’

  But before Felina could start reading the list of ingredients out loud, the cats heard the sound of a key in the lock and then Sybil’s voice screeching, ‘Don’t park the broomstick there, Mephisto. Lock it in the garage.’ Sybil had recently purchased a second broomstick – one of the latest models – and she was constantly afraid that it was going to get stolen.

  ‘Quick!’ India hissed. ‘Out through the cat flap.’

  When Sybil came into the kitchen it looked like a cat – or a very energetic kitten – had done a mad dash around the surfaces sending everything flying on to the floor, including her recipe book. The rubbish bin was knocked over and its contents were strewn all over the floor too. Sybil quickly picked up the recipe book and put it away in a drawer. It wouldn’t do to leave that lying about.

  Mephisto got an earful when he joined her in the kitchen. ‘You’d better keep that kitten of yours under control if you don’t want me to sell him to another witch!’ she yelled at him.

  Mephisto was surprised to see the mess and he couldn’t help feeling a little proud of his kitten. It must have taken a lot of strength to knock over Sybil’s bin like that. He spotted some chicken leftovers that Sybil had thrown in the bin the day before and started to drag a chicken bone with some nice fleshy bits left on it out through the cat flap, leaving a furious Sybil to clean up the floor.

  Sybil couldn’t afford to stay angry for long. She wanted to make up some potions that afternoon and she couldn’t do it without Mephisto’s help. All Sybil’s spells required a lot of witch-cat magic, which is why she was pleased to have two witch-cats to help her now instead of just the one. So after she had calmed down, she called Cosmo and Mephisto into the house and didn’t say a word about the raid on the kitchen. It didn’t cross her mind that any other cat apart from her own could have done it as she knew all the neighbourhood cats were afraid to come anywhere near her.

  That afternoon, Cosmo was going to help with his first spell and he was very excited about it. Sybil was using a shop-bought recipe book (written by a witch called Celia who had a cookery programme on Witch TV). Cosmo watched as Sybil opened a jar of frogs’ legs, unscrewed a large bottle of sea water, and sniffed at the contents of a tin of rats’ droppings to see if they smelt fresh. Lastly she went to fetch her bicycle pump, which contained some air that came from the top of a mountain in Wales. One by one she released the ingredients into her cauldron, and it started to bubble.

  ‘Now, Mephisto, if you will just oblige with two of your finest hairballs and a witch-cat sneeze, we will hav
e everything we need. Oh . . .’ She beamed at Cosmo. ‘You are going to provide the sneeze today. I forgot.’ She went to fetch the pepper pot, her eyes glinting greedily. ‘I’ve got to give the proper potion to Bunty Two-Shoes, but for everybody else I’ll water it down a little like I usually do. Then I’ll put the price up, seeing as I’ve got two witch-cats to feed now.’

  There were steps leading up one side of the cauldron and Cosmo watched as Mephisto mounted them, stopping at the top step to lean over the side. Each of the hairballs Mephisto coughed up seemed to make the liquid in the cauldron hiss and spit even more. Then Mephisto turned to him. ‘It’s your turn now. Make sure you sneeze over the cauldron, but don’t let yourself fall in. I knew a witch-cat who did that once and it wasn’t a pretty sight.’

  Cosmo nervously climbed up the steps to join his father. There was lots of smoke and steam coming out of the cauldron and Cosmo was almost deafened by the loud bubbling noise. When Cosmo reached the top step, Mephisto grabbed the scruff of his neck with his teeth just to make sure he didn’t fall in.

  Sybil shoved the pepper pot under Cosmo’s nose until it felt so itchy and tickly inside that he simply couldn’t not sneeze.

  ‘A-A-TISHOO!’ he burst out, opening his eyes and watching sneeze droplets shower down into the cauldron.

  To start with nothing happened. Then, as Cosmo watched, green sparks started to shoot up from the centre of the cauldron, then gold ones, then red stars, which shot up to the ceiling like rockets. The red stars banged as they reached the top and turned into showers of red-and-gold dust. It was just like watching a firework display.

  ‘There’s nothing like a witch-cat sneeze mixed with the right ingredients!’ Sybil crowed. ‘I’m a genius! A genius!’ And she started to dance around the kitchen.

  Cosmo and Mephisto smiled at each other, thinking that they were both pretty clever as well.

  The magic potion they had made was one of Celia’s (the TV witch-chef ) most popular recipes. It had recently been featured on Witch TV in a documentary about witch-cats. Celia’s magic potion was said to have saved the lives of a huge number of witch-cats by stopping them being hit by cars. If the potion was rubbed on a cat’s ears, it made the cat hear alarm bells ringing if it started to cross a road when a car was coming. The potion was expensive, but then so were witch-cats, and it was becoming more and more in demand by witches who lived on busy roads.

  ‘All I need to do is bottle it and do the labels,’ Sybil said. ‘Then, Mephisto, you can take some to Bunty before she comes round here making a nuisance of herself again.’

  ‘Can I come with you?’ Cosmo asked his father, thinking that he’d like to see the little girl called Scarlett again.

  ‘If you think you can manage the broomstick ride,’ Mephisto said. ‘It’s quite a long way. You’ll have to sit in front of me and let me hold on to you really tightly.’

  Cosmo’s mother and father never bit him when they picked him up with their teeth by the scruff of his neck, but it wasn’t very comfortable. Still, if he didn’t let Mephisto hold him by the scruff, he wouldn’t be allowed to go and he didn’t want that. This would be his first proper broomstick ride.

  ‘That’s OK,’ Cosmo agreed, quickly. ‘When are we going?’

  Cosmo was so excited as they set off that he almost forgot to wave a paw at his mother who was watching anxiously from the ground. He could see the Professor and Mia coming out into their garden to watch him too. He wondered if Mia wished she could fly as well. As Mephisto accelerated the broomstick upwards, Cosmo felt a funny lurching feeling in his tummy. They had barely passed over their own rooftop when he started to feel sick. The glass bottle with the potion inside was resting safely in the special delivery basket that Sybil had attached to the front of the broom, and Cosmo tried to keep his attention focused on that. But it was hard not to notice the chimneys and treetops and telegraph pylons and other tall things as they whizzed by, and it was also hard not to notice how far away they were from the ground.

  ‘Father, I feel ill,’ Cosmo gasped as his stomach gave another lurch and some foul-tasting liquid came up into the back of his throat.

  Mephisto couldn’t answer because he was gripping Cosmo tightly with his mouth.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ Cosmo kept asking, terrified he was going to be sick all over Sybil’s brand-new broomstick, but Mephisto just grunted and kept flying.

  After they had flown for what seemed like forever, with Cosmo’s stomach threatening to give up its contents at any minute, Cosmo glanced down – a big mistake – to see a little girl pointing up at him from her garden. As Mephisto brought the broomstick to an abrupt halt, Cosmo couldn’t keep his stomach under control any longer. He was sick all over Sybil’s shiny new broomstick, the basket and the bottle of potion, which had been carefully wrapped in purple tissue paper and tied with a green ribbon. (Sybil was actually surprisingly artistic when it came to wrapping up her products.)

  ‘It’s travel-sickness,’ Mephisto sighed, after they had landed. ‘I had it when I was a kitten too. You’ll get over it.’ And then, because he started to remember how horrible travel-sickness had felt when he had experienced it all those years ago, he gave Cosmo a sympathetic lick on the top of his head.

  The little girl in the garden turned out to be Scarlett. Bunty, who had seen them coming, came out of the house with a bucket of water to help clean up the broomstick and Cosmo. She said it didn’t matter about the potion because it would be fine when she took off the packaging.

  ‘Come inside and have some tea with us,’ she invited them. ‘Or milk if you prefer. I’ve just switched on the television. Jet and I were about to watch the Witch News.’ Every witch had a satellite dish attached to their house, which, though it looked like an ordinary one, provided them with all the worldwide witch channels. ‘Jet will be pleased to see you,’ she told Mephisto as he started to follow her. Mephisto and Bunty’s black cat, Jet, were good friends.

  Cosmo held back. He didn’t want to go inside in case he was sick again. His mother had told him that it was very impolite to be sick on someone’s carpet.

  ‘I’ll stay out here and look after him,’ Scarlett said. ‘I know how he feels. I’m all right on broomsticks now, but I used to only have to look at one and it made me want to throw up.’

  As Cosmo lay on the grass being stroked, the queasy feeling in his tummy gradually went away. He started to purr.

  He closed his eyes and had almost fallen asleep when Bunty called out excitedly from the house, ‘Come and see this, you two! Sybil’s mother is on the news!’

  5

  A reporter from the Witch News was interviewing Euphemia in her front room, the walls of which were painted gold. Euphemia had bright-green hair – she believed witches should keep their natural colour rather than dyeing it – and she was dressed in a very traditional black gown. She also wore a pointed black fur hat, which had a fake frog pinned rather fetchingly to the brim.

  ‘That hat looks like it’s made out of black-cat fur,’ Scarlett said, peering at it.

  ‘It’s fake, obviously,’ her aunt told her sharply, looking apologetically at Mephisto and Jet in case they had been offended by the remark. ‘No witch wears real fur – especially not cat fur.’

  The reporter – whose green roots were showing in his otherwise dark hair – was shoving a microphone in Euphemia’s face and asking her if she had always been keen on gold.

  ‘Yes,’ Euphemia replied, showing her two rows of solid-gold teeth as she smiled. ‘And as far as cats are concerned, I’d much rather have a gold one in my house, than a real one.’ As she cackled, the camera moved across the room to show a gold statue of a cat sitting in the middle of her mantelpiece. The cat’s face looked surprisingly lifelike.

  ‘I thought all witches needed witch-cats,’ Cosmo said.

  ‘Most witches do,’ Mephisto agreed. ‘But Euphemia is so powerful that she doesn’t need any help with her spells. That’s why Euphemia gave me to Sybil when her mother
– my previous mistress – died. Euphemia said that Sybil needed me more than she did.’

  ‘I understand that this statue is one of a hundred solid-gold statues of cats that you are going to put on sale in your exhibition, which is due to open next week,’ the Witch News reporter was saying.

  ‘A hundred!’ Bunty gasped in disbelief.

  ‘I guess what all our viewers will be wondering,’ the reporter continued, ‘is how you came to own one hundred solid-gold cats.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t purchase them,’ Euphemia said, pausing for dramatic effect.

  ‘Stole them probably,’ muttered Bunty.

  ‘I made them!’ Euphemia announced, showing off her gold teeth again as she beamed at the camera. ‘Artistic talent runs in my family, you know.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ spat out Bunty. ‘She could never have got hold of that much gold. Besides, she hasn’t got any artistic talent.’

  ‘And can you tell us how much gold went into making these works of art?’ the reporter was asking now.

  ‘You’d be surprised how little,’ Euphemia said, giving a secretive smile.

  The reporter cleared his throat. ‘Finally . . . Is it true that after you sell all these statues you’re going to be one of the richest witches in the world?’

  ‘Once I’ve sold my statues, I’ll happily tell you exactly how rich I am – so long as you don’t expect me to hand out any of my money to one of those charities you television people are always banging on about.’ She cackled again. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get on.’ She pushed the Witch News reporter to one side and shoved her own face up close to the camera. ‘Anyone who wants to order one of my statues ahead of the exhibition can email me.’ She flashed up a green card with her email address on it and three prices of statues – small, medium and large. The statues were expensive, but not so expensive that a rich witch or human couldn’t afford to buy one.