Witch Week (UK)

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “We all know about murder,” Dan protested.

  “Yes,” said Miss Hodge. She was watching everyone like a hawk now. “But we know even more about stealing, say, or lying, or witchcraft, or—” She let herself notice the broomstick again, with a start of surprise. It came in handy after all. “I know! Let us suppose that one of the people in our little play is suspected of being a witch, and the other is an inquisitor. How about that?”

  Nothing. Not a soul in 6B reacted, except Dan. “That’s the same as my idea,” he grumbled. “And it’s no fun without torture.”

  Miss Hodge made Dan into suspect number one at once. “Then you begin, Dan,” she said, “with Theresa. Which are you, Theresa—witch or inquisitor?”

  “Inquisitor, Miss Hodge,” Theresa said promptly.

  “It’s not fair!” said Dan. “I don’t know what witches do!”

  Nor did he, it was clear. And it was equally clear that Theresa had no more idea what inquisitors did. They stood woodenly by the blackboard. Dan stared at the ceiling, while Theresa stated, “You are a witch.” Whereupon Dan told the ceiling, “No I am not.” And they went on doing this until Miss Hodge told them to stop. Regretfully, she demoted Dan from first suspect to last, and put Theresa down there with him, and called up the next pair.

  Nobody behaved suspiciously. Most people’s idea was to get the acting over as quickly as possible. Some argued a little, for the look of the thing. Others tried running about to make things seem dramatic. And first prize for brevity certainly went to Simon Silverson and Karen Grigg. Simon said, “I know you’re a witch, so don’t argue.”

  And Karen replied, “Yes, I am. I give in. Let’s stop now.”

  By the time it came to Nirupam, Miss Hodge’s list of suspects was all bottom and no top. Then Nirupam put on a terrifying performance as inquisitor. His eyes blazed. His voice alternately roared and fell to a sinister whisper. He pointed fiercely at Estelle’s face. “Look at your evil eyes!” he bellowed. Then he whispered, “I see you, I feel you, I know you—you are a witch!” Estelle was so frightened that she gave a real performance of terrified innocence. But Brian Wentworth’s performance as a witch outshone even Nirupam. Brian wept, he cringed, he made obviously false excuses, and he ended kneeling at Delia Martin’s feet, sobbing for mercy and crying real tears.

  Everyone was astonished, including Miss Hodge. She would dearly have liked to put Brian at the top of her list of suspects, as either the witch or the one who wrote the note. But how bothersome for her plans if she had to go to Mr. Wentworth and say it was Brian. No, she decided. There was no genuine feeling in Brian’s performance, and the same went for Nirupam. They were both just good actors.

  Then it was the turn of Charles and Nan. Charles had seen it coming for some time now, that he would be paired with Nan. He was very annoyed. He seemed to be haunted by her today. But he did not intend to let that stop his performance from being a triumph of comic acting. He was depressed by the lack of invention everyone except Nirupam had shown. Nobody had thought of making the inquisitor funny. “I’ll be inquisitor,” he said quickly.

  But Nan was still smarting from the broomstick. She thought Charles was getting at her and glared at him. Charles, on principle, never let anyone glare at him without giving his nastiest double-barreled stare in return. So they shuffled to the front of the class looking daggers at one another.

  There Charles beat at his forehead. “Emergency!” he exclaimed. “There are no witches for the autumn bonfires. I shall have to find an ordinary person instead.” He pointed at Nan. “You’ll do,” he said. “Starting from now, you’re a witch.”

  Nan had not realized that the acting had begun. Besides, she was too hurt and angry to care. “Oh, no, I’m not!” she snapped. “Why shouldn’t you be the witch?”

  “Because I can prove you’re a witch,” Charles said, trying to stick to his part. “Being an inquisitor, I can prove anything.”

  “In that case,” said Nan, angrily ignoring the fine acting, “we’ll both be inquisitors, and I’ll prove you’re a witch too! Why not? You have four of the most evil eyes I ever saw. And your feet smell.”

  All eyes turned to Charles’s feet. Since he had been forced to run around the field in the shoes he was wearing now, they were still rather wet. And, being warmed through, they were indeed exuding a small but definite smell.

  “Cheese,” murmured Simon Silverson.

  Charles looked angrily down at his shoes. Nan had reminded him that he was in trouble over his missing running shoes. And she had spoiled his acting. He hated her. He was in an ecstasy of hate again. “Worms and custard and dead mice!” he said. Everyone stared at him, mystified. “Tinned peas soaked in sewage!” Charles said, beside himself with hatred. “Potatoes in scum. I’m not surprised your name’s Dulcinea. It suits you. You’re quite disgusting!”

  “And so are you!” Nan shouted back at him. “I bet it was you who did those birds in music yesterday!” This caused shocked gasps from the rest of 6B.

  Miss Hodge listened, fascinated. This was real feeling all right. And what had Charles said? It was clear to her now why the rest of 6B had clustered so depressingly at the bottom of her list of suspects. Nan and Charles were at the top of it. It was obvious. They were always the odd ones out in 6B. Nan must have written the note, and Charles must be the witch in question. And now let Mr. Wentworth pour scorn on her scheme!

  “Please, Miss Hodge, the bell’s rung,” called a number of voices.

  The door opened and Mr. Crossley came in. When he saw Miss Hodge, which he had come early in order to do, his face became a deep red, most interesting to Estelle and Theresa. “Am I interrupting a lesson, Miss Hodge?”

  “Not at all,” said Miss Hodge. “We had just finished. Nan and Charles, go back to your places.” And she swept out of the room, without appearing to notice that Mr. Crossley had leaped to hold the door open for her.

  Miss Hodge hurried straight upstairs to Mr. Wentworth’s study. She knew this news was going to make an impression on him. But there, to her annoyance, was Mr. Wentworth dashing downstairs with a box of chalk, very late for a lesson with 3A.

  “Oh, Mr. Wentworth,” panted Miss Hodge. “Can you spare a moment?”

  “Not a second. Write me a memo if it’s urgent,” said Mr. Wentworth, dashing on down.

  Miss Hodge reached out and seized his arm. “But you must! You know 6B and my scheme about the anonymous note—”

  Mr. Wentworth swung around on the end of her clutching hands and looked up at her irritably. “What about what anonymous note?”

  “My scheme worked!” Miss Hodge said. “Nan Pilgrim wrote it, I’m sure. You must see her—”

  “I’m seeing her at four o’clock,” said Mr. Wentworth. “If you think I need to know, write me a memo, Miss Hodge.”

  “Eileen,” said Miss Hodge.

  “Eileen who?” said Mr. Wentworth, trying to pull his arm away. “You mean two girls wrote this note?”

  “My name is Eileen,” said Miss Hodge, hanging on.

  “Miss Hodge,” said Mr. Wentworth, “3A will be breaking windows by now!”

  “But there’s Charles Morgan too!” Miss Hodge cried out, feeling his arm pulling out of her hands. “Mr. Wentworth, I swear that boy recited a spell! Worms and custard and scummy potatoes, he said. All sorts of nasty things.”

  Mr. Wentworth succeeded in tearing his arm loose and set off downstairs again. His voice came back to Miss Hodge. “Slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. Write it all down, Miss Hodge.”

  “Bother!” said Miss Hodge. “But I will write it down. He is going to notice!” She went at once to the staff room, where she spent the rest of the lesson composing an account of her experiment, in writing almost as round and angelic as Theresa’s.

  Meanwhile, in the 6B classroom, Mr. Crossley shut the door behind Miss Hodge with a sigh. “Journals out,” he said. He had come to a decision about the note, and he did not intend to let his feelings about Miss Hodge i
nterfere with his duty. So, before anyone could start writing in a journal and make it impossible for him to interrupt, he made 6B a long and serious speech. He told them how malicious and sneaky and unkind it was to write anonymous accusations. He asked them to consider how they would feel if someone had written a note about them. Then he told them that someone in 6B had written just such a note.

  “I’m not going to tell you what was in it,” he said. “I shall only say it accused someone of a very serious crime. I want you all to think about it while you write your journals, and after you’ve finished, I want the person who wrote the note to write me another note confessing who they are and why they wrote it. That’s all. I shan’t punish the person. I just want them to see what a serious thing they have done.”

  Having said this, Mr. Crossley sat back to do some marking, feeling he had settled the matter in a most understanding way. In front of him, 6B picked up their pens. Thanks to Miss Hodge, everyone thought they knew exactly what Mr. Crossley meant.

  29 October, wrote Theresa. There is a witch in our class. Mr. Crossley just said so. He wants the witch to confess. Mr. Wentworth confiscated my knitting this morning and made jokes about it. I did not get it back till lunchtime. Estelle Green has started knitting now. What a copycat that girl is. Nan Pilgrim couldn’t climb the ropes this morning and her name is Dulcinea. That made us laugh a lot.

  29.10.81. Mr. Crossley has just talked to us very seriously, Simon Silverson wrote, very seriously, about a guilty person in our class. I shall do my best to bring that person to justice. If we don’t catch them we might all be accused. This is off the record of course.

  Nan Pilgrim is a witch, Dan Smith wrote. This is not a private thought because Mr. Crossley just told us. I think she is a witch too. She is even called after the famous witch, but I can’t spell it. I hope they burn her where we can see.

  Mr. Crossley has been talking about serious accusations, Estelle wrote. And Miss Hodge has been making us all accuse one another. It was quite frightening. I hope none of it is true. Poor Teddy went awfully red when he saw Miss Hodge but she scorned him again.

  While everyone else was writing the same sort of things, there were four people in the class who were writing something quite different.

  Nirupam wrote, Today, no comment. I shall not even think about high table.

  Brian Wentworth, oblivious to everything, scribbled down how he would get from Timbuktu to Uttar Pradesh by bus, allowing time for roadworks on Sundays.

  Nan sat for a considerable while wondering what to write. She wanted desperately to get some of today off her chest, but she could not at first think how to do it without saying something personal. At last she wrote, in burning indignation, I do not know if 6B is average or not, but this is how they are. They are divided into girls and boys with an invisible line down the middle of the room and people only cross that line when teachers make them. Girls are divided into real girls (Theresa Mullett) and imitations (Estelle Green). And me. Boys are divided into real boys (Simon Silverson), brutes (Daniel Smith), and unreal boys (Nirupam Singh). And Charles Morgan. And Brian Wentworth. What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan. They are allowed to cross the invisible line to prove this. Everyone is allowed to cross the invisible line to be nasty to Brian Wentworth.

  Nan paused here. Up to then she had been writing almost as if she was possessed the way she had been at lunch. Now she had to think about Brian Wentworth. What was it about Brian that put him below even her? Some of Brian’s trouble, she wrote, is that Mr. Wentworth is his father, and he is small and perky and irritating with it. Another part is that Brian is really good at things and comes top in most things, and he ought to be the real boy, not Simon. But SS is so certain he is the real boy that he has managed to convince Brian too. That, Nan thought, was still not quite it, but it was as near as she could get. The rest of her description of 6B struck her as masterly. She was so pleased with it that she almost forgot she was miserable.

  Charles wrote, I got up, I got up, I GOT UP. That made it look as if he had sprung eagerly out of bed, which was certainly not the case, but he had so hated today that he had to work it off somehow. My running shoes got buried in cornflakes. I felt very hot running around the field and on top of that I had lunch on high table. I do not like rice pudding. We have had games with Miss Hodge and rice pudding and there are still about a hundred years of today to go. And that, he thought, about summed it up.

  When the bell rang, Mr. Crossley hurried to pick up the books he had been marking in order to get to the staff room before Miss Hodge left it. And stared. There was another note under the pile of books. It was written in the same capitals and the same blue ballpoint as the first note. It said: HA HA. THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO TELL YOU. DIDN’T YOU?

  Now what do I do? wondered Mr. Crossley.

  4

  AT THE END OF LESSONS, there was the usual stampede to be elsewhere. Theresa and her friends, Delia, Heather, Deborah, Julia, and the rest, raced to the lower school girls’ playroom to grab the radiators there, so that they could sit on them and knit. Estelle and Karen hurried to get the chillier radiators in the corridor, and sat on them to cast on their stitches. Simon led his friends to the labs, where they added to Simon’s collection of honor marks by helping tidy up. Dan Smith left his friends to play football without him, because he had business in the shrubbery, watching the senior boys meeting their senior girl friends there. Charles crawled reluctantly to the locker room to look for his running shoes again. Nan went, equally reluctantly, up to Mr. Wentworth’s study.

  There was someone else in with Mr. Wentworth when she got there. She could hear voices and see two misty shapes through the wobbly glass in the door. Nan did not mind. The longer the interview was put off the better. So she hung about in the passage for nearly twenty minutes, until a passing monitor asked her what she was doing there.

  “Waiting to see Mr. Wentworth,” Nan said. Then, of course, in order to prove it to the monitor, she was forced to knock at the door.

  “Come in!” bawled Mr. Wentworth.

  The monitor, placated, passed on down the passage. Nan put out her hand to open the door, but, before she could, it was pulled open by Mr. Wentworth himself and Mr. Crossley came out, rather red and laughing sheepishly.

  “I still swear it wasn’t there when I put the books down,” he said.

  “Ah, but you know you didn’t look, Harold,” Mr. Wentworth said. “Our practical joker relied on your not looking. Forget it, Harold. So there you are, Nan. Did you lose your way here? Come on in. Mr. Crossley’s just going.”

  He went back to his desk and sat down. Mr. Crossley hovered for a moment, still rather red, and then hurried away downstairs, leaving Nan to shut the door. As she did so, she noticed that Mr. Wentworth was staring at three pieces of paper on his desk as if he thought they might bite him. She saw that one was in Miss Hodge’s writing and that the other two were scraps of paper with blue capital letters on them, but she was much too worried on her own account to bother about pieces of writing.

  “Explain your behavior at high table,” Mr. Wentworth said to her.

  Since there really was no explanation that Nan could see, she said, in a miserable whisper, “I can’t, sir,” and looked down at the parquet floor.

  “Can’t?” said Mr. Wentworth. “You put Lord Mulke off his lunch for no reason at all! Tell me another. Explain yourself.”

  Miserably, Nan fitted one of her feet exactly into one of the parquet oblongs in the floor. “I don’t know, sir. I just said it.”

  “You don’t know, you just said it,” said Mr. Wentworth. “Do you mean by that that you found yourself speaking without knowing you were?”

  This was meant to be sarcasm, Nan knew. But it seemed t
o be true as well. Carefully, she fitted her other shoe into the parquet block which slanted towards her first foot, and stood unsteadily, toe to toe, while she wondered how to explain. “I didn’t know what I was going to say next, sir.”

  “Why not?” demanded Mr. Wentworth.

  “I don’t know,” Nan said. “It was like—like being possessed.”

  “Possessed!” shouted Mr. Wentworth. It was the way he shouted just before he suddenly threw chalk at people. Nan went backward to avoid the chalk which came next. But she forgot that her feet were pointing inward and sat down heavily on the floor. From there, she could see Mr. Wentworth’s surprised face, peering at her over the top of his desk. “What did that?” he said.

  “Please don’t throw chalk at me!” Nan said.

  At that moment, there was a knock at the door and Brian Wentworth put his head around it into the room. “Are you free yet, Dad?”

  “No,” said Mr. Wentworth.

  Both of them looked at Nan sitting on the floor. “What’s she doing?” Brian asked.

  “She says she’s possessed. Go away and come back in ten minutes,” Mr. Wentworth said. “Get up, Nan.”

  Brian obediently shut the door and went away. Nan struggled to her feet. It was almost as difficult as climbing a rope. She wondered a little how it felt to be Brian, with your father one of the teachers, but mostly she wondered what Mr. Wentworth was going to do to her. He had on his most harrowed, worried look, and he was staring again at the three papers on his desk.

  “So you think you’re possessed?” he said.

  “Oh no,” Nan said. “All I meant was it was like it. I knew I was going to do something awful before I started, but I didn’t know what until I started describing the food. Then I tried to stop and I couldn’t somehow.”

  “Do you often get taken that way?” Mr. Wentworth asked.