by Ged Gillmore
Poor Janice. She was one of those stupid witches who think their lives are hard just because they can’t sit around picking their toenails all day. She had no idea she was one of the richest beings in the world. Like you. Oh yes, you. Trust me, if you are reading this book with a roof over your head in a peaceful country with hot and cold running water, you are one of the rich ones. If you don’t believe me, try Sudan for the weekend (I’ll see you when you’ve got over the squits). Really, you should try it. Otherwise you might end up like Janice, wailing and crying about her poor miserable life not knowing how good she had it. It’s not everyone who can pop down to the shops and pick up a cockroach curry whenever they want to.
‘Boo hoo hoo,’ she was crying now. ‘WOAH wee wah!’
Janice started banging her head on the roof of the taxi, leaving dull dents in its tiger-stripe paintwork. Rodney ignored her. He’d spotted something inside the taxi that he thought might be important. Can you guess what it was? You guessed it! It was a pale ginger cat hair.
‘Aha!’ he said, so loudly that Janice stopped her head-banging and looked over the roof of the cab towards him.
‘Aha?’ she said.
‘Aha! Look what I can see!’
He pulled open the door in front of him, reached down to the floor, and picked up the ginger hair.
‘Look,’ he said (somewhat predictably), ‘it’s a ginger hair!’
‘So?’ said Janice. She was sticking out her bottom lip and catching the thick white goo falling from her nose. There were sticky green tears all over her face, and her hair was full of leaves which had fallen off the by-now-completely-dead tree. Rodney thought he’d never seen her looking so beautiful.
‘My love,’ he said. ‘Do you not see? This is all we need. I know any number of good location spells. All we do is combine this hair with the other ingredients, and we’ll easily find those miserable moggies.’
Suddenly Rodney could resist no longer. He came around the taxi and gave Janice a long, hard kiss. Then he sucked all the goo out of her nose and swallowed it with a big gulp. ‘Oh, how I love you,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a Purrari, whatever it takes.’
‘Oh, Wodney,’ said Janice.
‘Oh, Janice,’ said Rodney.
Now there was no more toxic gas pouring forth from either of them (apart from that stuff that just came out of their mouths), but it was too late for the tree, which was dead right to the tips of its deepest roots. As Rodney and Janice put their broomsticks together so they could straddle them as one and fly off into the black night, the tree first teetered, then it tottered, then with a long, slow creak and a massive great crack it fell over, smack on top of the taxi. Rodney and Janice looked down from their broomsticks, and their horrible cackling filled the night.
‘Mwah ha ha ha! Mwah ha ha ha haaaaaaaaa …’
A BIT OF THIS, A BIT OF THAT
It wasn’t even nearly dawn when the Burringos got back to the apartment, even though they’d been kissing and canoodling all the way back. Rodney logged onto his laptop and went straight onto Spookle, while Janice ran upstairs to slip into something a little more comfortable. I can’t tell you what it was because I have no idea what could be more comfortable than a big, baggy witch’s cloak, so you’ll have to use your imagination. Maybe it was silky undies, who knows. Anyhoo, by the time she came back down, Rodney was hard at it, looking for spells.
‘Look!’ he said. ‘There’s one here that links into Spookle Maps so you can trace the object of your search as it moves.’
‘Rodney …’
‘But this one’s best. It’s got hundreds of great reviews on Spellchecker, and the ingredients aren’t too bad, and it needs only a tiny percentage of the object. One hair should be fine.’
‘Rodney, lover boy, can’t that wait? Let’s leave it until tomorrow.’
Rodney looked at Janice. ‘Don’t you want a Purrari?’
‘Yes but—’
‘Well then. I’m going to make a list of what we need and go down to the Chelsea drugstore, get my prescription filled at the same time.’
Janice knew when she was beat. Once Rodney Burringo got an idea in his head, there was no stopping him. She’d loved that about him once and indeed had thought it was the reason he was made for money. Now she wasn’t so sure. She stomped into the kitchen and flicked on the cauldron to make a cup of pee.
‘Have we got any dried buttock?’ Rodney called through from the living room.
Janice opened the cupboard and moved some things around to make it sound like she was looking.
‘Mmm … can’t see any,’ she said.
This was true. She couldn’t see any because although her hand was in the cupboard, her eyes were on a TV listings magazine she’d spotted on the counter. It was open to that night’s viewing, and she was scouring for a good soap opera. Shame really, as there was a big unopened tub of dried buttock at the very front of the bottom shelf.
‘What about lemons?’ said Rodney.
‘Mmm?’
‘Lemons?’
‘Yes, dear,’ said Janice, who’d found a fascinating story about the presenter of Incantation Tonight and his battle to overcome sympathy. She barely noticed the noise of Rodney getting ready and looking for his keys.
‘Right then, I’m off,’ he said. ‘We need buttocks … maybe I can get some fresh … and no lemons.’
Janice was halfway back to the living room, a mug of steaming pee in one hand and the magazine in the other, before she even realised Rodney had gone.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘He didn’t say goodbye. How rude.’
Janice deplored rudeness in any form. It does have its uses though, and for Janice it was an excuse to sulk, open a packet of biscuits and watch the telly with the sound up high. None of which helped her one iota when Rodney arrived home half an hour later with a bag of fresh buttocks and no lemons.
Now, where were we with Ginger and Tuck? Er, something about a fence. Did they go under the fence yet? Oh yes! Tuck was leaping, dog was creeping, Ginger wasn’t weeping even though she felt like it. Got it.
With her eyes closed tightly Ginger could clearly hear the dog getting closer and closer. Soon she could feel the warmth of his breath, which smelled, coincidentally, exactly the same as Janice Burringo’s favourite perfume, Kennel No. 5. Closer and closer the dog came, so that even the saliva dripping from his fangs could be heard, slippy sloppy slurp slurp. But then the dog stopped and said, ‘Oh.’ Just like that.
‘’Ere,’ he said. ‘Ain’t you Ginger Jenkins?’
Ginger hadn’t been called that in a very long time, and she carefully opened one eye.
‘It is you!’ said the dog, whose huge white fangs were only inches away from her. ‘Ginger Jenkins, blow me down. I saw you fight in ’37. They showed it again on the telly the other day. You was amazin’.’
‘Gulp,’ said Ginger. Then she opened her other eye and said, ‘Thanks.’
‘You not fight no more then?’ said the dog. He tilted his head to one side in a way that made him look slightly less terrifying than before. But only slightly.
‘Retired,’ said Ginger.
‘Oh man, you was great in those days. I saw you up against Paw Robeson in the finals. I thought he had you beat. Man, he was a dirty fighter, Robeson. Then you got ’im with your famous five-claw finisher. What you doin’ in my yard?’
‘Er … just needed somewhere to spend the night,’ said Ginger. ‘That alright?’
‘Course not!’ said the dog. ‘Didn’t you see the sign on the fence? It says “Danger—Guard Dog”. I start letting cats sleep in ’ere, I’ll be a laughing-stock. Won’t be able to show my tail down the park without it getting bitten off. Nah, sorry, love, I’m going to have to tear you to pieces.’
‘What’s your name?’ Ginger asked him, blatantly playing for time.
‘Brad,’ said the pit bull.
‘OK, Brad,’ said Ginger, thinking quickly. ‘How about a fair fight? Just you and me, nose to nose, no glov
es.’
‘It’s not how I normally do it,’ said Brad, frowning nastily. He’d turned his head back to normal and was at his scariest again.
‘You scared?’ said Ginger. ‘Worried I’ll get the upper paw?’
‘Me, scared?’ said the dog, backing out from under the jeep. ‘You’re on. Come on out here and we’ll make a fair fight of it.’
Ginger took a deep breath and followed the dog out into the half-lit yard. He’d already chosen his corner, sitting himself down against the jeep’s front tyre.
‘You’re a big cat,’ he said, ‘but you’re out of shape. You’re going to get it, you’re going to regret it, you should have taken your chance while you could let it.’
‘I hope you fight better than you rap,’ said Ginger, who herself could rap faster than a department store shop assistant at Christmastime.
Brad went on undeterred. ‘You used to be on telly, now you’re just belly, and you know what’s worse?’ He sniffed the air between them. ‘You’re even gettin’ smelly.’
Ginger rolled her eyes and gave the most gingery sigh in this entire book.
‘Brad, that’s bad; Brad, that’s sad. Rapping fighters was only a fad. You want to get to it? You want to kung fu it? If you have a coach, you’ll really want to sue it.’
Ginger’s writ-wit was not a hit with the pit. He was champing at the bit, having a fit, couldn’t take any more of her showmanship. Then ‘Hit it with your mitts,’ said Tuck after a bit, thinking he should really do more than just sit.
‘Quit it,’ said Ginger. ‘I’m trying to concentrate.’
But Tuck was excited too now. ‘Bite him on his bum, then he’ll be glum!’ he shouted down from the fence.
‘Tuck, please,’ said Ginger.
‘Who’s your friend?’ snarled Brad.
‘Just someone I brought along to make you look intelligent,’ said Ginger. Then she put out one paw and beckoned Brad forward. ‘Come on, mutt-face’ she said. ‘Let’s see if you’ve got any pit to go with all your bull.’
Well, she didn’t have to ask twice. The pit bull leapt at her with his mouth wide open, his lips drawn back, and his huge teeth coming full at her. Ginger heard Tuck yowling in fear, but she knew all she had to do was focus. Wait for it, wait for it, and then slash! She stuck out all the claws of her left paw and sliced them across the front of the dog’s shiny black nose.
Now, as you may or may not know, a dog’s nose is possibly the most sensitive part of its body. Imagine how much you’d scream if a cat gave you five deep lacerations on the most sensitive part of your body. Well, that’s pretty much how much this dog screamed. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a dog yelp for help, but it’s a high-pitched and horrible noise. It’s so expressive of pain and misery that you can’t hear it without wanting to rush to the poor little doggy’s assistance. Unless, of course, that poor little doggy has just been trying to kill you, which, I need not point out, was the case here.
Ginger didn’t hang around to see if Brad was going to come back for more. She turned on her tail and ran full speed to the fence and squeezed under it and into the street. Tuck saw what she was up to and jumped down beside her, and the two cats ran as fast as they could into the night, leaving the street empty behind them but for the powerful and pitiful, piercing pitches of a pit bull pooch in pain.
It took two hours for Rodney to stop shouting at Janice, get back to the drugstore, find a shop with lemons, and calm himself into a mood for cooking spells. Oh yes, folks, it’s all sauce and sorcery in this book. Maybe we should call it that? I know until now it’s been called Cats on the Run, but from now on we could call it Sauce and Sorcery. It has a classic ring to it, don’t you think? Oh, suit yourselves.
Eventually, all grew quiet in the Burringos’ apartment. Janice had fallen asleep in front of the Occulture Channel, and Rodney had put the TV onto mute. He’d taken his laptop into the kitchen and was switching his attention between the location spell and an old Le Curset cauldron he kept for special spells. He’d mashed up the buttocks in the pestilence and mortar and fried it in some hair oil before throwing in some tongue of frog and eye of newt.
‘Fair is foul and foul is fair,’ Rodney sang under his breath. ‘Hover through the fog and the filthy air.’
This was the difficult part of the recipe. Rodney had to split the cat’s hair right down the middle. Now, splitting hairs is a very annoying process and difficult to do when you want to and difficult not to do when you don’t. So Rodney laid the ginger hair on the chopping board and focused all his attention on it as he split it straight down the middle. It was a perfect job, the job of a professional, the job of a psychopathic killer (aka witch). He added one half of the hair to the buttock mixture, and then, just as the instructions on the screen of his laptop demanded, he weed into the cauldron for exactly twenty-two seconds.
‘Bubble and hiss, boil my peas,’ he said, pouring in the 200 grams of frozen peas directed by the recipe. Then he waved his wand airily over the broth and hacked up a really good greeny.
‘Phwar.’ Rodney spat it into the cauldron. ‘Cook on the hob, dissolve my gob,’ he said, and gave another waft of his wand. Then he turned the heat down to low, set the timer to thirty-four minutes, and went into the living room. He rummaged through the drawers of his desk—not caring a terwit-terwoo if he woke Janice up—until he found a map of the city. Back in the kitchen he found the half a hair he hadn’t thrown into the cauldron. He carried it carefully back to the map and laid it in the middle.
‘Wizardry, witchery, hocus-pocus,’ he said, his hand flat above the hair. ‘Show me where, let me focus.’
Of course nothing happened because he hadn’t drunk the potion yet. What did you think he was doing in the kitchen, steaming his face? This was just a practice to ensure he got it right when he did it for real. For sorcery, like baking, requires great precision. Rodney said the words a few more times until he felt confident he’d got the spell down pat. Then time ticked by slowly in the apartment, and Rodney felt like he was waiting for hours for the spell to be ready.
At last, the timer rang in the kitchen. Rodney ran in, picked up the cauldron, and poured the scorching broth down his throat. It burned of course, but that was part of the spell. Everything has its price, and the price of this spell was first-degree throat burns, which is why there was a hyperlink to first-degree-throat-burns-healing-spells on that page of Spookle.
‘ACHHHH,’ said Rodney, who was not normally as carefree with consonants or vowels as his wife, but it really did hurt. ‘Eek.’
Once all the boiling and surprisingly tasty broth was down his throat, Rodney stumbled back to the living room and put his hand flat over the map.
‘Xardry, xichkraft, ocush-pocush,’ he gurgled through his scorched and blistered lips. ‘Xo me ware, let me focush.’
Rodney had no idea if that would be enough. Whoever had written the spell hadn’t said how difficult it would be to speak with a loathsomely lacerated larynx. Rodney stood there staring at the map, wondering if his croaking had been sufficient. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe it would be a waste of time. Maybe he should get to the burns unit. But then a dull blue glimmer appeared above the map, and slowly but surely the split hair began to move.
Rodney steeled himself against the pain in his throat, bits of which were now falling off and going down his gullet. He held himself up on the table and watched the hair as it stood up on one end and moved across the map. Not to the west, east, or south, nor even to the north. No, it headed straight north-east, out past the furthest suburbs and into the countryside. Then it stopped and twirled around a very specific spot. Quickly, Rodney grabbed a pen and drew a circle around that precise point on the map. Then he ran back to the kitchen, yanked open the fridge, and pulled out the bin juice anti-burns potion he’d wisely prepared earlier. ‘Ah,’ he said as the stinking liquid trickled down his throat. ‘How very refreshing.’
Rodney leant against the kitchen counter to catch his breath an
d panted with relief that the pain had ended at last. Back in the living room he found Janice had woken up.
‘What was all that banging and crashing?’ she said. ‘Pwoar, it smells of burning throat flesh in here. What have you been up to?’
Rodney told her all about it. She sniffed his breath to check he was telling the truth (and also because she was still feeling a little necromantic from earlier, and there is nothing more attractive to a witch than bin juice on a man’s breath).
‘Oh, my brave knight,’ she said. ‘Oh, my big soldier.’
Rodney took Janice’s hand and led her over to the table and the map. There, in its top-right corner, was the big red circle he’d drawn not ten minutes before. In it lay the half-hair. Janice watched as Rodney picked it up carefully and placed it into an envelope from the desk drawer.
‘Can we use it again?’ she said.
‘It’s good for about a week,’ he said. ‘We can use it about as often as we want in that time.’
They both peered at the map.
‘How did they get so far?’ said Janice.
Rodney frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘So what do we do now?’
‘Now,’ said Rodney, watching the sky grow light outside the window and the tired black bags under Janice’s red eyes. ‘Now we go to bed.’
THIS BIT
The city where this story starts and ends is large and sprawling. Let’s face it, most cities are. In the good old days, you had walls around a city, a moat if you were lucky. A clear definition of where the city ended and the countryside began. These days who can tell? Are you in an outer suburb or a separate town? A part of the greater big city or a separate place altogether? Modern life is so difficult. But all urban sprawls run out eventually. Either they hit a coast or a mountain range or—as is the case here—they just stop being so built-up. They have fewer and fewer buildings, let the odd field in, then another and another until, before you know it, you’re in the countryside.
‘Look!’ said Tuck at six o’clock the following morning. ‘We’re in the countryside.’
