by Heide Goody
“Aw, dat’s just impressive,” said one imp and tried to get the clapping started; not easy as he had successfully removed both hands moments earlier.
While some continued to savagely attack their own bodies and others crowed and cheered for their near headless leader, Jenny felt hands on the ropes binding her.
“Soon have you out of here, my fiery one,” whispered Zoffner.
“Now, where is stupid little imp?” demanded Malunguibus.
“Stupid? Moi?” called Jizzimus from atop a ceiling beam. “All I see is a bunch of pussy-whipped morons. Look at that one! ’E’s trying to eat ’is own foot.”
“You will regret calling us mor— Oi!” yelled Malunguibus.
As the last of Jenny’s bonds were loosed, Malunguibus tried to grab her. She rolled aside and hit the floor ready to run. Dee and Kay were in the doorway. Kay snatched up a bottle of apple hooch and clonked a nearby imp on the head. Dee sang a brief snatch of an up-tempo disco number and wiggled her hands in what Jenny recognised as one of her mending spells. Mending?
Malunguibus was lunging after Jenny when the saw blade in his neck started up.
Dee’s look of grim satisfaction turned to dismay as the saw mended beautifully. The blade spun through Malunguibus’s neck as if it were an extra part of him. Malunguibus glanced down, grunted in approval, and resumed his charge.
The delay had given Jenny and Zoffner the precious seconds they needed. They tumbled out into the stable yard with Dee and Kay. A second later both Malunguibus and Clappoxian slammed into some invisible barrier across the doorway.
Dee stared in surprised.
“They’re penned in,” said Jenny, catching her breath. “Magically.”
Clappoxian hurled the still at them through the barrier, leaving a trail of apple hooch. It smashed harmlessly on the ground.
Jenny looked at her saviours. “How did you know where to find me?”
“Your imp told me,” said Dee.
“The bees told me,” said Kay.
Jenny looked from Kay to Dee and back again. “Have we got some catching up to do?”
“Not until you tell your imp to get off my shoe,” said Kay, lifting her goggles to pull an expression of distaste.
The flying parasol struggled with the weight of the witch and the wheelchair beneath it. Norma had the parasol angled straight up but it was still only rising at a crawl. Caroline climbed up by herself, using a bed, then a shelf, then the roots of the magical oak to reach the opening. She hauled herself out into the night air to find Shazam tending to the other witches on the lawn.
“That was fun,” said Shazam. “Like a fairground ride.”
“You’ve been to some rubbish fairgrounds,” said Caroline.
“What now?”
“The minibus,” said Caroline. “It’s just round the corner. We get everyone loaded up and out of here. To the nearest hospital for preference.”
Shazam pointed into the sky. “Why are they still rising?”
“Because I can’t angle the damned thing down!” Norma yelled from on high.
Caroline glanced up. Norma was drifting over the roof of Eastville Hall with a wheelchair swinging precariously from the end of her parasol. Green witchfire flew up towards the wheelchair. Sabrina gesticulated wildly and the fire flowed harmlessly around her.
“Catch!” yelled Norma.
Caroline was almost struck in the face by a bulging paper bag. As two figures, green fire at their fingertips, ran towards them across the lawn, she looked in the bag.
“Cool beans,” she grinned. “Cobwebs! Get this lot to the minibus! Now!”
“Nere you are, noo gucking ’itches.”
Jenny and her rescuers had been so intent on the enraged imps and generally being glad to be alive, they had not noticed Doug Bowman staggering towards them across the stable yard, Taser in hand.
Jenny had any number of things she wanted to say, powerful and hurtful things. They were all relegated to second place at the sight of Bowman. Who inflated your face? she wanted to ask, or How are you even still standing when your entire body is so swollen? In the end she settled for “What happened to you?”
“’Ees.”
“’Ees?”
“Vees! Allergy. Gucking hur’s.”
Curiosity satisfied, Jenny curled her fist into a ball of witchfire. Bowman, inflated like a Cabbage Patch Doll though he might be, was still fast. He lunged forward and grabbed Kay by her collar.
“Li’l girl caused ’e no end of ’rouble.”
He held the Taser up to her neck. Kay twisted away and swung the bottle of hooch at him. Bowman parried with the Taser, smashing the bottle. Kay stumbled. Zoffner ran forward to assist. Bowman met him with a savage punch, sending the mystic reeling with a bloody nose.
Bowman growled. Maybe he was saying something and the bee venom was closing up his mouth and throat. Or maybe it was just a growl.
Bowman growled and activated the Taser. A mistake: his hand and arm were coated in highly flammable spirits. The growl became a scream as his arm ignited. He flapped and spun. Kay scrambled away into Jenny’s arms.
Bowman made another mistake. Even in his panic, he remembered to drop and roll on the ground, to put the fire out. Unfortunately, he rolled on the spot where the still had smashed.
Dee pulled Zoffner away from the flaming eruption. Kay pushed at Jenny, pushed her further and further away, far beyond the fire’s reach.
“It’s okay,” said Jenny. “It’s okay.”
Kay’s dirt-streaked face met hers. “Gas canisters,” said the young witch simply.
Jenny looked up. The flammable hooch had left a trail. The fire was snaking from Bowman’s self-immolation towards the stables.
“Oh, crap,” said Jenny.
“Fireworks!” yelled Jizzimus.
Above Caroline’s head, Norma was struggling to keep her parasol and the dangling wheelchair under control. Off to her right, Shazam urged, cajoled and carried the freed witches towards the minibus. In front of her were two wicked witches. A spurt of green flame shot at Caroline’s face and she managed to turn away in time to suffer no more than a touch of instant sunburn.
Caroline felt distinctly under-prepared for the task in hand. Her police training had covered combat techniques and riot situations, but failed to address a situation where your assailants could fry you with witchfire. Here she was, armed with a paper bag as a one-shot defence. A paper bag, and a hard-ass attitude.
The ginger-haired witch brought a fiery hand back like a baseball pitcher winding up. She didn’t get chance to unleash: at that moment, something exploded at the far end of the house, sending debris and flame into the air and a tremor through the ground.
Caroline saw the wheelchair dangling beneath flying parasol tip – caught by the blast. It struck the roof of the old house and plunged straight through, Sabrina still on board. The sound of roof tiles shattering was quickly followed by the less defined sounds of many other things being smashed.
The initial explosion rocked the dining room, knocking over wine glasses and jolting a mounted gazelle’s head askew. Effie opened her mouth to exclaim but was distracted by a tremendous crash from upstairs. Speckles of plaster dust fell onto the table, There was a second, closer series set of crashes.
“Don’t tell me no one heard that!” Effie yelled.
“I think our pest problem is still with us,” said Natasha, giving meaningful glances to her lady guests.
Effie wasn’t sure how to respond to that. She never got the chance, as a wheelchair, an occupied one at that, burst through the ceiling and landed in the centre of the table.
Caroline recovered from her shock a fraction of a second before the wicked witches.
“Agatha! Get her!” screamed the red-haired one.
Caroline lobbed the paper bag as Agatha prepared to unleash her fire. The bag split in mid-flight, and a cloud of iron filings and other sweepings off Norma’s shed floor showered over the woman. A red shotgun blast pattern inst
antly erupted over the wicked witch’s face and exposed arms. The redhead threw up her hands to shield herself from the poisonous iron. Caroline pegged it towards the minibus.
Seconds later, one of the wicked witches evidently had the idea to clear the cloud of burning iron fragments with witchfire. Perhaps they had missed that particular high school chemistry experiment, or they didn’t care. Whichever, a flash of light as bright as day illuminated Caroline’s way to the minibus as the wicked witches briefly turned themselves into the world’s largest sparkler.
Madison Fray, wearing a flaming hat and a stunned expression, stood beside the minibus. “Is something happening?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Caroline, with a flick of the wrist. “You’re going to drive this minibus as quickly but as safely as you can to the nearest hospital.”
“Yes,” he said, “I am going to drive this minibus as quickly—”
“Just get in!”
Caroline looked for signs of Norma or the wheelchair-riding Sabrina. She saw none, Deciding a dozen birds in a bus was worth two in the sky she jumped into a passenger seat.
“Drive, Madison!”
“Seatbelts everyone!” shouted Shazam in the back. “Now, has anyone seen my cat?”
With a shout of “Veikti!”, Dee kicked off from the ground and rode her strimmer above the ruin and smoke to where Norma circled a hole in the roof. Even flying round in the night sky, they could each read the other’s expression.
“Report, Miss Finch,” said Norma.
“Rescued Jenny from the stables. Lots of imps, many of them in little pieces. That wicked policeman blew himself up. Effie Fray is still in the house. Oh, and Kay and Zoffner are not dead. Repeat, not dead.”
Norma allowed herself a moment of wide-eyed ecstatic joy at the news her possibly/possibly-not boyfriend wasn’t toast before snapping back into her usual officious manner.
“We rescued Miss Black, Miss Jaye and eleven other witches from some awful blood farm. Unfortunately, I dropped Sabrina down that hole— The fiends!”
Norma was looking across the roof towards the driveway. The minibus had reached the road and was turning south towards Stickney village. What had caught Norma’s eye were two women jumping into cars to make their pursuit. By firelight and reflected headlights, one of them was clearly Lesley-Ann Faulkner.
“Go,” said Dee.
Norma looked at her.
“Go,” Dee insisted. “We’ll find Effie and Sabrina. Go keep them safe.”
Norma folded herself over her parasol like a hawk preparing to dive and shot off towards the cars.
On the stable yard – some of which was aflame and much of which was less vertical than before – Jizzimus bounced on Jenny’s shoulder.
“Glad you’re not dead an’ everything boss, but we’re not out of the woods yet.”
“Okay,” said Jenny.
“Let’s hurry it up a bit, eh? You’ll ’ave no end of mad ole baggages on yer tail in a minute. You’ll be the entertainment in between their main course an’ their puddin’ if you ’ang around.”
“We need to get inside.”
“Inside?” said Kay, who was helping Zoffner hold a tissue to his bloody nose.
“Effie’s in there, and the list of witches.”
“What list?”
Dee came in to land, leapt from her flying strimmer and jogged to a halt. Despite everything else, Jenny laughed. “The look on your face.”
“What about it?” said Dee.
“You’ve never looked happier. I think you were born to fly.”
Dee blushed.
“So what’s the plan?” asked Kay.
“We need a distraction.”
“You mean, apart from one end of the house being on fire and the other having a giant tree growing out of it?” said Dee.
“A distraction from us taking the fight to the wicked witches.”
“I think that can be arranged,” said Zoffner, blinking as he tried to gaze at his own broken nose.
At Natasha’s command, several of her guests had run from the dining room, in search of – as far as Effie could work out – some pest or other. The rest turned angrily to the witch who was still sitting in her wheelchair atop the dining table.
“Sabrina,” said Natasha coldly.
“Elizabeth Báthory,” said the young witch, colder still.
Effie glanced at Kevin. It was relief to see someone else with as little idea what was going on as herself.
Natasha flung her hands forward and poured – was that witchfire? – onto Sabrina. Effie dropped to the floor and crawled behind her chair. It was turning out to be a very confusing and ultimately disappointing evening. Effie had worn her favourite Rolling Stones T-shirt especially, and now she had red wine and Marie Rose sauce all over it.
“Priorities, Effie,” she chided herself, clinging to her paltry shield as the table cracked and splintered under the continuous blast of witchfire.
Dee stood on the lawn with Zoffner the Astute, ready to carry out her part of the hastily arranged plan. She was tasked with summoning the bees to create a distraction in the dining room, and then flying up to join Kay and Jenny in the final assault.
Dee’s bee-lore was not as advanced as it really should be. She concentrated hard to recall what Norma had taught her. She tapped a foot and gave a brief experimental spin.
“Groovy,” said Zoffner. He mimicked her movements, embellishing them somewhat. His bee dancing was halfway between a goose step and a raver in full ecstatic flow. Dee found it so mesmerising that she unconsciously stepped along with it. Remarkably, a few moments later, a bee swarm hummed over their heads, a thousand black bodies against the night.
Zoffner smiled at her in encouragement. “Shake it, dreamy lady.”
Another swarm came from a different direction.
“Shake it yourself, poppet,” said Dee.
Several more swarms joined the first. Before long, bees filled the sky. As one they plunged towards the house. Dee and Zoffner paused in their dancing to watch.
“Where are they going?” asked Dee. “I thought I was telling them to go down the chimney and enter the dining room.”
“Oh were you?” said Zoffner. “I was doing Mr Mistoffelees from Cats.”
A piercing, terrified meowing filled the air. Something the size and shape of Mr Beetlebane, if he were surrounded by layers and layers of bees, took to the air. The strange, buzzing cat-shaped bundle headed up the roof.
“Oh, that’s not good,” said Dee.
The bee-cat collective rose up to the chimney stack and disappeared inside, with a long trailing cloud of bees in close pursuit, swirling around like an emptying drain.
“But it will certainly be a distraction,” said Zoffner philosophically as Dee mounted her strimmer.
Madison, enchanted, drove as fast as the narrow fenland roads would allow.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Caroline asked him.
“Boston,” he said. “Twenty minutes tops.”
There was a sparkle of light in the wing mirror.
“Caroline!” called Shazam.
Caroline tumbled over the front seat into the rear. The headlights of two cars in convoy were rapidly catching up with them. “That’s Dee’s car,” she said.
“Mustapha?” said Dee.
“What’s going on?” shouted Madison.
“Nothing, handsome. Just you keep driving. Aunty Caroline will deal with this.” She had no idea how.
Eventually, the huge dining table gave way under the heat of Natasha’s witchfire. The legs buckled, the tabletop cracked in two and the whole thing fell flat to the ground.
“My leg!” screamed Kevin Carter-King from somewhere.
Effie coughed and waved away the wood smoke.
Surprisingly, Sabrina in the wheelchair was entirely unharmed. Natasha and her guests appeared surprised.
Sabrina rolled her neck. “Ur, it is as almost as if I had cast Cherlindrea’s Seat of Sanctity on th
is contraption.”
“There’s no escape,” said Natasha.
“I’m perfectly happy here,” Sabrina replied in the satisfied tones of a woman who had all the time in the world.
Jenny and Kay grabbed what weapons they could as they ran round the house. They reached the front door holding a garden fork and a pair of shears. Jenny was uncomfortable in such close proximity to lumps of iron and she’d rather have been armed with the fork than the unwieldy shears she’d picked up.
They watched the bees vanish into the various chimneys of the house.
“I wonder what that funny noise is,” said Jenny.
The unholy screeching echoed up from the chimney, like a tortured soul in a well.
“Do you think they’re distracted yet?” said Kay.
“Distracted?” said Jizzimus. “Let’s see, someone dropped an angry witch through the roof in a wheelchair. They’ve got every bee in the land in there by the looks of it and somehow a banshee is in the chimney. I should fucking cocoa.”
“We get in there,” said Jenny, “grab Effie and Sabrina and any other innocent bods we find, get out and hightail it out of here.”
Dee swooped down to join them on her flying strimmer, giving Jenny the giddy notion that they could be filming the opening sequence for a television gardening makeover show, or a really terrible new superhero franchise.
“We going in or what?” said Dee impatiently, killing the power as she stepped off.
“Just waiting for you, Rambo,” said Jenny.
Effie often felt life was a play she had come into halfway through. She had never felt it more than now; but she was slowly putting the pieces together.
Natasha was a wicked witch. Most, if not all of her guests, were wicked witches. Sabrina had been her prisoner but was now freed. The bizarre explosions outside, the structural shift in the house that had warped floor boards here and there, and the unnerving yowling coming from the chimney were still mysteries to her, but she was prepared to accept them as such for now.
