Earwig and the Witch

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Earwig had to sweep and scrape and scrub for the rest of the day. But she was so busy thinking of ways to get a hair from Bella Yaga’s head that she hardly noticed what she was doing. She thought if she could only find Bella Yaga’s bedroom, it would be easy. There would be a comb or a hairbrush on the dressing table and there would be hair in those. Bella Yaga never tidied anything up.

  By suppertime the floor was almost clean, but not quite. Bella Yaga grinned meanly. “You can go to your bedroom and have bread and cheese for supper there,” she said. “That might teach you not to be so lazy in the future!”

  Earwig ran to her room, hoping to see the demon who brought the bread and cheese. But it was a little disappointing. Something certainly came into the room. There was a whirling wind and a feeling of hotness. But all Earwig saw was a plate of Ploughman’s Lunch from the pub down the road, which suddenly appeared in the middle of her bed, and the whirling stopped as soon as she saw it.

  “Are you there?” said Earwig. But nothing was.

  After she had eaten the Ploughman’s Lunch—it was quite filling, with two kinds of pickle and a hardboiled egg as well as cheese and French bread—Earwig thoughtfully took the screwdriver from under her pillow. She knelt down by the wall that was supposed to have the bathroom on the other side and started to make a hole in it with the screwdriver. Thomas had said that the Mandrake’s room was on the other side. It stood to reason that Bella Yaga’s room was there, too. So Earwig bored and twiddled and scraped with the screwdriver, until she felt the end of it come loose into air on the other side of the wall. Then, very slowly and gently, scarcely daring to breathe, she pulled the screwdriver out and put her eye to the hole.

  A hotness blew in her eye. She had to wipe plaster dust out of it before she could look again. When she had, she found she was not looking at a bedroom. Nor was it the bathroom. It seemed to be a kind of study through there, painted in black and gold and red. The huge figure of the Mandrake was nearby, sitting at some kind of desk. Beyond him was a whirling, writhing Something. Earwig could only see bits of the something, but she was fairly sure it was a demon. And if it was a demon, she knew she did not want to see a demon ever again. She took her eye away and plugged up the hole with the screwdriver.

  “Bother!” she said. This did not get her any nearer to getting hold of one of Bella Yaga’s hairs. She squatted on her heels, thinking. After a bit, still thinking, she got up and went to the bathroom and looked at the wall there. Sure enough, there was a little crumbly hole and she could just see the tip of the screwdriver sticking through it.

  “I don’t understand magic,” Earwig said. “She’s going to have to teach me about it.”

  Next morning, Bella Yaga was screaming as usual. “Wake up! Hurry up! The Mandrake wants fried bread for breakfast today!”

  Earwig shot out of bed, shot into her clothes, and shot to the hall to go to the bathroom. There she came to a dead stop and stood staring at Bella Yaga’s red hat, hanging on its peg.

  “Of course!” she said. “I bet there’s a hair in that hat!”

  Quickly, she unhooked the hat and, sure enough, there were two hairs, curly and blue-purple, clinging to the hatband inside. Earwig picked them off and raced to the bathroom, where she hid them in her sponge bag.

  “Hurry up!” screamed Bella Yaga.

  You wait! Earwig thought. She hurried to the kitchen and put some slices of bread in the frying pan. The bread drank all the fat in the pan and then it burned, in spite of Earwig pouring in what felt like a gallon more fat as it cooked.

  The Mandrake stared at the plate of dry black slices. “What is this?” He turned his eyes to Earwig. She saw the red sparks lighting up in them.

  “I’ve never done fried bread before,” she said. “Isn’t it right?”

  “No,” said the Mandrake. The burning pits of his eyes turned to Bella Yaga. “Why didn’t you teach her how?”

  Bella Yaga went pale. “Well, I—er—anyone can cook fried bread.”

  “Wrong,” said the Mandrake. “Don’t let it disturb me again.” He waved his hand. There was a sort of wavering in the air over his left shoulder. A sweet voice spoke out of nowhere.

  “How can I serve my hideous master today?”

  “Don’t be rude,” growled the Mandrake. “You can take this food away and get me some real fried bread from the scout camp in Epping Forest.”

  “Yes, ghastly master,” the voice said. The wobbling air whirled. In the time it took Earwig to blink, the burned bread had gone and there were golden crisp slices on the plate instead. The Mandrake grunted and began to eat, then, in terrible, powerful silence. Bella Yaga kept very quiet, too. Earwig saw that Thomas had crawled away to hide behind the wastebucket under the sink, so she wisely said nothing either. Breakfast seemed to go on for a year.

  When it was over at last, Bella Yaga hurried Earwig to the workroom. “How dare you disturb the Mandrake like that!” she scolded. “You nearly had me in bad trouble!”

  “Well, you should try to teach me things instead of just making me do them,” Earwig said.

  “Don’t give me silly excuses!” said Bella Yaga. “You’re here to work. I told you I need another pair of hands.”

  You’ll get them, Earwig thought fiercely.

  They started work. When enough time had passed to make it seem likely, Earwig said, “I need to go to the toilet.”

  “Anything to annoy me!” said Bella Yaga. “All right. You can have exactly two minutes. Any longer and I give you worms.”

  Earwig raced away to the bathroom and collected the two hairs from her sponge bag. She raced to her bedroom. In a terrible hurry, she lifted up the pillow, planted the two hairs on the little image of Bella Yaga, and raced back to the bathroom to flush the toilet. She sped back to the workroom.

  There was a terrible howl as she opened the door. Thomas shot between Earwig’s legs and dived into her bedroom out of sight.

  “What have you done?” Bella Yaga was shrieking. “You wicked girl, what have you done?”

  Earwig put both hands over her mouth in order not to laugh out loud. She had not noticed where she had stuck on the extra hands. She had been in too much of a hurry. One had ended up stuck to Bella Yaga’s forehead. It flapped there, with its fingers opening and shutting in front of Bella Yaga’s eyes. As Earwig looked, its finger and thumb found Bella Yaga’s nose and pinched. Bella Yaga howled and spun around. The other hand, to Earwig’s great pleasure, was stuck to the back of Bella Yaga’s tweed skirt like a tail. That was pinching her, too.

  “Whad hab you dud?” Bella Yaga yelled again, trying to wrench the finger and thumb away from her nose.

  “Given you an extra pair of hands,” Earwig said. “Just like you said you wanted.”

  “Ooh!” howled Bella Yaga. “I’ll gib you wurbs!”

  Earwig found herself being pushed and hurried backward. It was like being swept by an invisible broom. The pushing landed her inside her bedroom and shut the door on her with a slam. Earwig heard the lock click and knew she was locked in, this time. She turned around and saw Thomas standing on her bed, looped into a hoop, with his fur on end and his eyes staring.

  “Stay there!” Bella Yaga screamed from outside. “Stay there with wurbs!”

  Thomas gave a long and trembling howl and dived under the covers of Earwig’s bed. There he crawled and pushed and scrambled until he was a small very flat hump right down at the very end.

  “You don’t need to hide,” Earwig said to him. “We did that spell. She can’t hurt us.”

  But Thomas clearly had no faith in the spell at all. He stayed where he was and would not speak or move, even when Earwig prodded him. She sighed and sat on her bed to see what would happen about the worms.

  After a minute or so, the image of Bella Yaga flew out from under the pillow and flopped on the floor. Earwig saw that the two little hands had come loose. She picked up the image and tried to stick the hands back on. She tried them in several places, but nothing seemed t
o make them stick. Earwig sighed again, because she knew that Bella Yaga had somehow broken the spell completely.

  Then the worms arrived. They appeared in a big wriggling bundle out of nowhere and fell to the floor by Earwig’s feet. Earwig pulled her feet out of their way and stared down at them. There seemed to be at least a hundred of them. They were the size of earthworms, and as Bella Yaga had promised, they were blue and purple and very wriggly. The wriggliness, Earwig saw, was because the worms were not happy out on the bare floor. Some of them were trying to wriggle down the cracks in the floorboards to get out of the daylight.

  “Our spell works,” Earwig told the hump that was Thomas. “The worms are on the floor, not doing any harm at all.”

  The hump refused to move or speak.

  “Scaredy-cat!” said Earwig. “You’re worse than Custard.”

  But since Thomas still refused to speak or come out, Earwig sat and thought about the worms. They did not worry her at all, for being worms. But something worried her. After a while, she knew what it was. Those worms were supposed to be inside her. If Bella Yaga found out they were on the floor instead, she would know that Earwig and Thomas worked the spell to keep themselves safe. And then Bella Yaga would break that spell at once.

  Earwig wondered how to hide the worms. The only hiding place in the room was inside the bed, and since Thomas was so scared of worms, that was not kind. But—Earwig’s eyes went to the screwdriver still sticking out of the wall. That hole she had made was exactly the right size to take a worm. Bella Yaga never seemed to go near the bathroom, so the worms could creep under the bathmat and stay hidden there until Bella Yaga decided to let Earwig out. Then she could put them in a bucket and take them out into the weed-garden, where they would be happier.

  Earwig got up and pulled the screwdriver out of the wall. Then she picked up the nearest blue wriggling worm and coaxed it into the hole. The worm went in eagerly. It really hated being out on the floor. As soon as it was through, Earwig picked up the next, and the next. She put worm after worm through the wall, feeling as if she was doing a good deed. Everyone was much happier like this, and Bella Yaga need never know.

  She was feeding the last worm through the hole when Thomas crawled out from under the bedclothes. “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Sending the worms to hide in the bathroom,” Earwig explained.

  “No!” yowled Thomas and went back under the bedclothes like a rat up a drainpipe.

  “Honestly, Custard—I mean, Thomas!” Earwig said as she let go of the last worm’s tail. “Anyone would think—”

  The wall turned red-hot.

  Earwig got to the other side of the room quicker even than Thomas had got down inside the bed. There was a growling from behind the red-hot wall that very quickly rose to a howling and then a roaring. Earwig covered her ears. As she did, most of the wall vanished and the Mandrake stormed through. He was alight with black fire and taller than ever. His eyes were red pits of rage. Dark fire streamed backward from the horns on his head.

  Earwig found herself crouched under her bed without knowing how she had got there.

  “Worms!” bellowed the Mandrake. “I’LL GIVE HER WORMS!”

  From under the bed Earwig saw his huge feet, which now seemed to have claws on them, make smoking holes in the floor as he marched across her bedroom and out through the wall beside the door. A roaring and rushing filled the air behind him. Peeping from where she crouched, Earwig saw scaly paws, ratty tails, slimy hooves, horny wing tips, and many queerer things that were parts of the host of demons following the Mandrake. She did not try to see all of any of them. In fact some of them made her hide her face in her hands.

  There was a huge crash as the Mandrake walked through the workroom wall. There was a noise like a thunderstorm. Earwig heard Bella Yaga shrieking, “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!” Then she heard Bella Yaga shrieking angry spells. Then there was a crashing, and Bella Yaga was just shrieking. Earwig saw flickers of green and black light.

  Then there was quiet. It was not a good quiet. Earwig stayed where she was. She did not move, nor take her hands from her face, even when she heard her bedroom door open.

  “Come out,” said the Mandrake.

  Earwig crawled out, very slowly. To her surprise, there were no burned patches in the floor and no kind of holes in the walls. The Mandrake was standing in the doorway looking like an ordinary man in a bad mood, except for the little red sparks in the middle of his eyes.

  “She gave you worms,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Earwig, “and I put them into the bathroom to hide. It was a mistake.”

  “Magic worms go through into a magic place,” the Mandrake said. “They went into my den. She won’t do that to you again. You won’t do that again. I’ve told her she’s to make you a proper assistant and teach you properly. I don’t like being disturbed.”

  “Thank you,” said Earwig. “Could you make her send me to school tomorrow, too, when term starts? I need to see my friend Custard.”

  “Maybe,” said the Mandrake. He walked across to the wall where Earwig had made the hole.

  “The bungalow will be much more peaceful if I’m out all day,” Earwig pointed out quickly.

  “I’ll think about it,” said the Mandrake. He walked into the wall and vanished.

  “Oh well,” said Earwig. She turned around and dug Thomas out from under the bedclothes. He lay heavy and soft in her arms. Earwig put her face on his fur, and he began to purr. Earwig smiled. She thought about what had just happened. “You know,” she told Thomas, “if I work things out right, we ought to be able to make both of them behave just the way we want them to.”

  She carried Thomas across the hall to the workroom. Bella Yaga, looking red and harried, was picking up broken glass and bits of mixing bowls. She turned her blue eye nastily in Earwig’s direction. Earwig said quickly, before Bella Yaga could speak, “Please, I’ve come for my first magic lesson.”

  Bella Yaga sighed angrily. “All right,” she said. “You win—for now. But I wish I knew how you did it!”

  A year went by.

  Earwig sighed happily as she woke up and tried to get her toes from under fat Thomas. Everyone in her new home now did exactly what she told them to do. It was almost better than the orphanage. The Mandrake had even taken to calling her Dearwig. When Earwig asked him to tell his demons to fetch her breakfast, the demons fetched it at once. They were beginning to do what Earwig told them to do without her having to ask the Mandrake first. Yesterday they had brought her the breakfast menu from the best hotel in town. Earwig picked it up and studied it.

  Breakfast in bed with kippers, she thought, or scrambled eggs, or why not both? While she was wondering whether or not to have yogurt as well, she remembered the only sad thing in her life. Nothing would induce Custard to come and visit her. He was much too afraid of the Mandrake. Still, she thought, deciding to have mixed grill after all, she could work on Custard just as she had worked on her new household.

  About the Author

  In a career spanning four decades, award-winning author Diana Wynne Jones wrote more than forty books of fantasy for young readers. Characterized by magic, multiple universes, witches and wizards—and a charismatic nine-lived enchanter—her books are filled with unlimited imagination, dazzling plots, and an effervescent sense of humor that earned her legendary status in the world of fantasy. Her books, published to international acclaim, have earned a wide array of honors, including two Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Honors, the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Award for having made a significant impact on fantasy, and the World Fantasy Society Lifetime Achievement Award. Acclaimed director and animator Hayao Miyazaki adapted her international bestseller Howl’s Moving Castle into a major motion picture, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

  www.dianawynnejones.com

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  About the Illu
strator

  Paul O. Zelinsky’s exquisite illustrations are admired by fans worldwide and have established him as one of the top illustrators in children’s book publishing. He illustrated Z Is for Moose, by Kelly Bingham, and Doodler Doodling, by Rita Golden Gelman. Rapunzel, his retelling of the classic fairy tale, won the Caldecott Medal in 1997. He received Caldecott Honors for Rumpelstiltskin and for his illustrations in Hansel and Gretel, by Rika Lesser, and Swamp Angel, by Anne Isaacs. Paul O. Zelinsky lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  www.paulozelinsky.com

  Credits

  Jacket art © 2012 by Paul O. Zelinsky

  Jacket design by Sylvie Le Floc’h

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Earwig and the Witch

  Text copyright © 2012 by Diana Wynne Jones

  Illustrations copyright © 2012 by Paul O. Zelinsky

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  The right of Diana Wynne Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her.