The Real cat on wheels
   
It's a simple choice. The cat travels either in:
   a) a box, or
   b) a stupor.
   It's strange that dogs can take a car ride in their stride and still bounce out at the other end, more than ready to widdle, dribble, dig, bite small children and all the other things dogs are good at, while cats find the whole business terribly trying.
   Research indicates, however, that a small proportion of Real cats actually like car travel, provided it is on their terms. One of ours was quite at home with the whole thing provided it could sit on the driver's shoulder and watch the road ahead, which is probably against the law.13
   Animals loose in a car are never a good idea. Goats are generally the worst, but until you realise there's a tortoise stuck under your brake pedal you've never known the meaning of fear, and possibly not the meaning of “old age” either.
   An object lesson in the perils of travelling with a cat was provided by friends who took theirs with them when they moved house. It was the last journey—you know, the one where you leave the final key with the neighbours, promise to keep in touch, dig up a few prize plants and set off up the road for the last time with all the things the removal men couldn't or didn't or wouldn't put in the van, like the kids, strange items of kitchen ironmongery, and the cat.
   But this was all okay because as far as the cat was concerned a car was just a load of sleeping areas on wheels, and off they went up the motorway, you know the sort of thing, “Are we nearly there yet?”; “No you don't feel sick it's just your imagination.”
   And then they stopped at a service area.
   Really, you don't need to know the rest of the story. You can guess it. But for those who need it spelled out…
   They forgot about the cat. They got out, they got fed, they got in, they drove another seventy miles, they got out, they started to unpack, there was no cat. Cat must have got out.
   Midnight. Car screams into service area car park. Near-hysterical man staggers out with plastic bowl, spoon, lurches around the car park trying to look as nonchalant as is possible concurrent with banging a bowl with a spoon and shouting “Pusspaws!” in a strained falsetto (he was not, at that time, a paid-up member of the Campaign; if he had been, he'd have been wise to this sort of event and would have changed the cat's name to something like “Wat!” or “Zip!) An hour goes past. Leaves telephone number with least unsympathetic of the waitresses, drives back, visions of family pet laminated to fast lane…
   Cat leaves it until he's almost home before coming out onto the back seat and yawping for food. With the elderly car so crowded, it'd found a way via the arm-rest hole into the back of the boot, where it had settled down comfortably behind the spare tyre. But you knew that, anyway.
   The Campaign for Real Cats recommends a way to cut through the whole problem of taking cats with you to new homes. It gets rid of all that business of hiding under the bed, peering suspiciously out of the back door, looking betrayed, etc.
   The thing is, you see, that your average Real cat becomes attached not to human beings but to routines and territory. It's fashionable to agonise about wives or husbands giving up happy careers to follow the spouse across country, but no one thinks twice about the fact that the family cat may have spent years breaking in dozens of sleeping nests, working out best prowling routes, pouncing places, etc.
   The human beings around the scene are merely things provided by Nature for, eg, opening fridges and tins. The cat becomes quite attached to them, of course. You can become quite attached to a pair of slippers, for that matter. But it is much easier to become attached to new blobs than new sleeping areas. In short, the Campaign for Real Cats believes that when you move house the kindest thing you can do to the cat is leave it behind, where it will grieve for .003 seconds before sucking up shamefully to the new owners.
   As for you, as a catless catlover you will find that a stray turns up outside your new door within days. We think some sort of agency sends them.

The Real cat and other animals
   
Remember. From the cat's instinctive point of view, the animal world consists of:
 
   1) things that eat it
   2) things it can eat
   3) things it can eat but regret immediately;
   and
   4) other cats.
 
   But we then expect it to be perfectly at ease when faced with:
 
   a) Meals On Treadwheels
   b) meals in cages (the Flying McNuggets)
   c) mad quivering meals in hutches, which in the worst cases may be forced to join our Real cat, plus two dolls and a teddy bear, for a back-lawn tea, party consisting of water and crumbled biscuits
   d) feathery meals which are actually encouraged to come onto the back lawn for breadcrumbs
   e) meals in ponds
   f) large grubby barking things
   g) miscellaneous.
 
   It's a wonder they stay sane. In fact, as all Real cat owners know, cats get around most problems caused by all of the above by pretending that they don't exist. Just like us, really.
   The only household pet I have ever known actually faze a Real cat is a tortoise. This may be because a cat has problems coming to terms with the fact that a tortoise is a fellow fauna. It appears to be a small piece of scenery which inexplicably moves about.
   These days you don't shove a tortoise in a box to tough it out for the winter, since no one makes tortoises any more and they change hands, people keep telling us, for zillions of pounds. We used to let ours doze the winter away in front of the fire, lurching awake every day or two for a bit of lettuce. A peaceful, untroubled existence, but one which did not appeal to Real cat because a tortoise is impossible to frighten. Tortoises don't know the meaning of the word “fear” or, indeed, any other word. Oh, they nip into their shell at a passing shadow out of common sense, but as far as they are concerned the presence of a cat in front of the fire just means that here's a pile of fur that is nice and warm to burrow under.
   They sneak up on it, because for tortoises there's no other way, and the first the cat knows is when the edge of a shell is purposefully levering it off the carpet. The cat goes and sits in the corner and looks worried. And then one of them develops an unnatural appetite for cat food. The Real cat sits looking gnomically at a shell seesawing madly on the edge of its dish, and sighs deeply.

The Real cat and the gardener
   
Peas, greens, parsnips, rhubarb… these are, the concerns of your average gardener.
   Black thread, twigs, wire netting, incendiary mines… these are the concerns of your average gardener who has a Real cat. Or, rather, whose neighbour has a Real cat.
   It is possible to cultivate your garden when there are Real cats around, but the price of celers, is eternal vigilance. As one exasperated Real gardener14 remarked, “It's not just what they Do, it's what they do afterwards”, viz, the conscientiously clawed conical heaps, out of which the little yellow shoots of what would have been beans poke pathetically.



   The Great Ballistic Clod of Earth has already been touched on. Other possible defences are:
 
1. The Things that Rattle, Bang, Whizz and Whirr
   
Look, these don't scare anything. Well, all right, maybe moles. Come to think of it, we haven't had any moles since installing them. We've never had any moles, actually.
 
2. The Wire Maze
   
Real cats step over it.
 
3. Chemical warfare, including the Mysterious Blobs, the Terrible Dust and the Curious Gungy Stuff
   
Since it always rains incessantly imediately, this barrage is laid down, we've never found out if any of them work. Anyway, we always feel vaguely uneasy about this sort of thing. Probably there's some international Accord that no one's bothered to tell us about.
   The point is that the cat's desire to get onto your pitiful plot is far greater, believe me, than your desire to keep it off. When Nature calls, it shouts. Which leads us on to:
 
4. The Big Roll of Wire Netting
   
The gardener's friend. Watch their Expressions when They Find An Impenetrable Barrier of Steel laid Above Your Precious Seeds!!!
   You can make little wire bootees for the beans, too, and encase the lower parts of your more valuable apple trees in demure corsets of wire. The snags are 1) a garden that looks like an MoD instalation, 2) a tendency to trip up, and

3) the fact that plants grow through the wire.
   
This doesn't matter with things like onions, but we left it too late with the potatoes and they had to be dug up as a unit. But if you can't tolerate this, your only recourse is:
 
5. The Catapult
   
But we're not that kind of people.15

The Real cat and children
   
Ah. They can grow up together.
   Well, not really. By the time the average child is no longer doing Winston Churchill impersonations the kitten has grown up and, unless Measures have been Taken, has a family of its own. Kittens and children get on like a house on fire—and just think about what it's actually like in a house on fire…
   
A Real kitten in a Real household with a junior member can expect to be:
 
   
1) pulled
   
2) pushed
 
3) imprisoned in Cindy's bedroom with Cindy, Mr T in one of Cindy's dresses16, a one-armed teddy bear, a fearsome Madeofplasticoid with Lazer-zap cannon and a small pink pony
   
4) fed unsuitable food. In this category can be included peas, ghastly sweet pink goo, and a fortnight's worth of Kittytreats in three minutes
   
5) inserted into unsuitable clothing (cf. Cindy, Barbie, Action Man, etc).
   
6) carried around by being held in the middle, so that large amounts of cat flop down on either side. (Strangely enough, most cats put up with this, even when they are great fat neutered toms. It's like all that business with unicorns. Only young maidens can get away with it. The rest of us need stitches.)
 
   It's not that children and young animals get along especially well. It's just that young animals aren't experienced enough to know what's going to happen. Stick to puppies. They're practically childproof.

The cats we missed
   
As has been mentioned already, Man has throughout history tried to overcome various deficiencies—his inability to outrun a hare, dig up a badger, bite lumps out of a burglar's behind, carry brandy barrels through deep Alpine snow, etc—by breeding a variety of dog to do it for him. The dog, in fact, has been a kind of handy Plasticine, rolled out thin or squeezed up fat to suit the demands of the time.
   Since speculating on what things might be like if history had been different is now thoroughly acceptable in the best scientific circles, the research branch of the Campaign for Real Cats started to wonder what might have happened if dogs hadn't been so handy.
   Perhaps there was a great plague, for example, or all dogs were wiped out by a series of devastating but amazingly accurately pinpointed meteor strikes back in the lower Obscene Age. They also uncovered some early experiments hitherto unheard of.
   Winding forward to the new-look Present Day, then, we would have seen:
 
   The Bullmog: Bred originally in the 14th century for the purposes of bull-baiting. However, this was not a very successful experiment and led almost instantly to the virtual extinction of the breed since it could not, when faced with an irate bull, overcome the instinct to jump on it, try to trap it on one paw, throw it in the air, etc.
 
   Smoocher: Something of a mongrel and a favourite with poachers, the Smoocher combines elements of the Eeke, the Bullmog and anything else that happened to be passing and couldn't run away fast enough. It is renowned for its intelligence and cunning. It is so intelligent and cunning, actually, that it is very difficult to get it to do any work at all. Its preferred way of catching rabbits, for example, is to send them a brief note consisting of letters snipped out of newspapers, making them an offer they can't refuse.
 
   King Charles' Lapcat: Familiar to everyone. Note length of ears.
 
   The Eeke: The smallest cat in the world. The Eeke was originally bred as a court pet of the H'sing H'song emperors, and was not introduced to occidental cat fanciers until the 17th century. It was, initially, a toy for high-born ladies but it was soon found to be extremely useful since it was the same size as the mice, and could go down their holes and mug them on the corners. Mouse-baiting, using trained Eekes, was a popular pastime among the sporting classes for a while. This caused long-term problems, however, since the more intelligent Eekes realised that with the mice wiped out and the walls of an entire manor house at their disposal there was no need to come out. They are still a nuisance in some parts of the country where, apart from the theft of food, the purring of an entire breeding colony can keep guests awake at night.
 
   The Tabby Retriever: Likely to be seen in the back of the kind of cars that are driven by people who wear green wellies and those jerkin things apparently made out of flattened mattresses. Originally a guncat, the Tabby Retriever was renowned for chasing the quarry, letting it go, chasing it again, pouncing on it, and bringing half of it back to the owner.
 
   The Smog: A cat bred, quite simply, to fight other cats. Owing to an unexplained occurrence of Lamarckian heredity, the Smog lost its ears in the 16th century, its tail—which opponents could hang onto—in the 17th century, and most of its hair in the ring, while its claws and teeth lengthened and toughened. An ordinary cat, going up against a Smog, might as well run into an aeroplane propeller. Good with children.
 
   Dachskatz: An affectionate pet, often referred to as the “sausage mog”. Popular in the home that can't afford draught excluders. Also, the only cat that can brush up against the front and the back of your legs at the same time.
 
   The St Eric: Many a weary traveller, half-buried in the snow, has hauled himself out and kept himself warm at the sheer rage of seeing a St Eric curl up and go to sleep twenty yards away. They were never a great success, since they depended on a cat's natural sense of charity and benevolence.
 
   The Pussky: Much used by lazy Eskimos, trappers, Mounties, etc. Refuses to go out in cold weather.
 
   The Snufflecat: This breed came into its own in the American South, when it was used to track escaped slaves and convicts, who were very lucky escaped convicts and slaves indeed because, although the Snufflecat has a superb sense of smell, it doesn't know what to do with it.
 
   The German Sheepcat: Never very good with sheep, actually, but a great favourite with police departments across the world. The cat's natural tendency to rub up against people has, in these 150lb specimens, become a desire to smash open doors and knock people to the floor, where they are drooled on.
   (The most famous German Sheepcat was the film star RanCanCan, who had a spectacular if somewhat brief career in the 1940s. Faced with bridges being washed away ahead of speeding express trains, or fire breaking out in tall orphanages, or people being lost in ancient mine workings, RanCanCan could be relied upon to wander off and look for something to eat. But very, very photogenically.)

The future of the Real cat
   
If you're prepared to accept the Schrodinger theory, then it is rosy—in fact, the last man on Earth will probably look out of his bunker and find a cat sitting there patiently waiting for the fridge to be opened.
   Actually, theories don't come into it. Real cats are survivalists. They've got it down to a fine art. What other animal gets fed, not because it's useful, or guards the house, or sings, but because when it does get fed it looks pleased? And purrs. The purr is very important. It's the purr that does it every time. It's the purr that makes up for the Things Under the Bed, the occasional pungency, the 4 a.m. yowl.
   Other creatures went in for big teeth, long legs or over-active brains, while cats just settled for a noise that tells the world they're feeling happy. The purr ought to have been a pair of concrete running shoes in the great race of evolution; instead, it gave cats a rather better deal than most animals can expect, given Mankind's fairly unhappy record in his dealings with his fellow creatures. Cats learned to evolve in a world designed initially by nature but in practice by humans, and have got damn good at it. The purr means “make me happy and I'll make you happy”. The advertising industry took centuries to cotton on to that beguiling truth, but when it did, it sold an awful lot of Cabbage Patch dolls.
   You've got to hand it to Real cats.
   If you don't, they wait until your back is turned and take it anyway.
   It's nice to think, though, that if the future turns out to be not as bad as people forecast, ie, if it actually even exists, then among the domes and tubes of some orbiting colony, hundreds of years from now, dynamic people with sturdy chins, people who know all about mining asteroids and stuff like that, will still be standing outside their biomodule banging a plastic plate with a spoon.
   And yelling “Zut!” or “Wip!”, if they've got any sense.
______________________________ __________
Сноски
   1. After considerable heated debate, the Committee wishes it to be made clear that this statement should not be taken to include, in order, small white terriers with an IQ of 150, faithful old mongrels who may be smelly but apparently we love him, and huge shaggy wheezing St Bernards who consume more protein in a day than some humans see in a year2 but understand every word we say, no, really, and are like one of the family.
   2. The committee, failing despite tremendous pressure to have this phrase removed, haha, have asked it to be amended to “has a healthy appetite for a dog of his age”. This refers to the way the huge snout drops like a bulldozer3 and pushes a bowl the size of a washbasin clean across the kitchen, I suppose.
   3. The committee can say what they like, but the Chairman, who indeed fully admits never to have experienced the joys and pleasures of dog ownership, intends never to do so, and fully accepts that there are houses where dogs and cats live in domestic harmony, has seen him eat.
   4. If you meet a vegan it's bad form to give them the famous four-fingered V sign and say “Live long and prosper”. That's for vulcans. Vegans are the ones with the paler complexions who can't disable people by touching them gently on the neck.
   5. All right, not perhaps a name you'd use every, day, but best to have one ready, just in case, because when you're leaning against the freezing cold water tank trying to staunch the blood with a priceless antique copy of Dante, you don't want to have to tax the imagination.
   6. If St Francis of Assisi had prided himself on his broccoli, and saw the last little seedling turning yellow because of the ministrations of Itsthatsoddingtomfromnextdoor, he would have done the same thing.
   7. Apart from the garden fork, and this isn't that type of book.
   8. Or the cauliflowers and leeks, naturally.
   9. ie, uncertain. Because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle.
   10. One that you can't do, and which won't work.
   11. A 17-member ring ketone, according to my dictionary, as opposed to the mere 15-membered muscone from the musk deer. Does the civet feel any better for knowingthis? Probably not.
   12. Who invents these scents, anyway? There's a guy walking along the beach, hey, here's some whale vomit, I bet we can make scent out of this. Exactly how likely do you think this is?
   13. It is: Cats Travelling on Shoulder (Prohibition) Order, 1949.
   14. This is not the time and place for extensive definitions. Let's just say that the Real gardener is not the same as the Proper (or Radio) gardener. For example, when the Proper Gardener has finished digging, harrowing, sifting, aerating and raking, he has a tilth, possibly even a friable one; when the Real gardener has conscientiously done all these things he has a large heap of stones, roots, twigs and old seed row markers (Country folk used to believe that certain types of stone were “mother stones”, which gave birth to new stones every year; under our garden is a Plastic Seed Row Marker generator.) A Proper gardener has a lawn consisting of Chewings Fescue, Red Bents and Ryegrass; a Real Gardener has moss imbedded with dolls' legs, plastic alphabet characters and clothes pegs. And large areas down to Cat.
   15. ie, can't aim properly.
   16. This sort of thing used to happen all the time in our house. I blame television.

Chapter 1
A Clang Well Done

Some things start before other things.
It was a summer shower but didn’t appear to know it, and it was pouring rain as fast as a winter storm.
Miss Perspicacia Tick sat in what little shelter a raggedy hedge could give her and explored the universe. She didn’t notice the rain. Witches dried out quickly.
The exploring of the universe was being done with a couple of twigs tied together with string, a stone with a hole in it, an egg, one of Miss Tick’s stockings which also had a hole in it, a pin, a piece of paper and a tiny stub of pencil. Unlike wizards, witches learn to make do with a little.
The items had been tied and twisted together to make a . . . device. It moved oddly when she prodded it. One of the sticks seemed to pass right through the egg, for example, and came out the other side without leaving a mark.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly, as rain poured off the rim of her hat. There it is. A definite ripple in the walls of the world. Very worrying. There’s probably another world making contact. That’s never good. I ought to go there. But . . . according to my left elbow, there’s a witch there already .. . .’
‘She’ll sort it out, then,’ said a small and, for now, mysterious voice from somewhere near her feet.
‘No, it can’t be right. That’s chalk country over that way,’ said Miss Tick. ‘You can’t grow a good witch on chalk. The stuff’s barely harder than clay. You need good hard rock to grow a witch, believe me.’ Miss Tick shook her head, sending raindrops flying. ‘But my elbows are generally very reliable.’*
‘Why talk about it? Let’s go and see,’ said the voice. ‘We’re not doing very well around here, are we?’
That was true. The lowlands weren’t good to witches. Miss Tick was making pennies by doing bits of medicine and misfortune-telling, † and slept in barns most nights. She’d twice been thrown in ponds.
‘I can’t barge in,’ she said. ‘Not on another witch’s territory. That never, ever works. But . . .’ she paused, ‘witches don’t just turn up out of nowhere. Let’s have a look . . .’

* People say things like ‘listen to your heart’, but witches learn to listen to other things too. It’s amazing what your kidneys can tell you.

† Ordinary fortune-tellers tell you what you want to happen; witches tell you what’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. Strangely enough, witches tend to be more accurate but less popular.

She pulled a cracked saucer out of her pocket, and tipped into it the rainwater that had collected on her hat. Then she took a bottle of ink out of another pocket and poured in just enough to turn the water black.
She cupped it in her hands to keep the raindrops out, and listened to her eyes.
Tiffany Aching was lying on her stomach by the river, tickling trout. She liked to hear them laugh. It came up in bubbles.
A little way away, where the river bank became a sort of pebble beach, her brother Wentworth was messing around with a stick, and almost certainly making himself sticky.
Anything could make Wentworth sticky. Washed and dried and left in the middle of a clean floor for five minutes, Wentworth would be sticky. It didn’t seem to come from anywhere. He just got sticky. But he was an easy child to mind, provided you stopped him eating frogs.
There was a small part of Tiffany’s brain that wasn’t too certain about the name Tiffany. She was nine years old and felt that Tiffany was going to be a hard name to live up to. Besides, she’d decided only last week that she wanted to be a witch when she grew up, and she was certain Tiffany just wouldn’t work. People would laugh.
Another and larger part of Tiffany’s brain was thinking of the word ‘susurrus’.. It was a word that not many people have thought about, ever. As her fingers rubbed the trout under its chin she rolled the word round and round in her head.
Susurrus . . . according to her grandmother’s dictionary, it meant ‘a low soft sound, as of whispering or muttering’. Tiffany liked the taste of the word. It made her think of mysterious people in long cloaks whispering important secrets behind a door: susurrususssurrusss . . .
She’d read the dictionary all the way through. No one told her you weren’t supposed to.
As she thought this, she realized that the happy trout had swum away. But something else was in the water, only a few inches from her face.
It was a round basket, no bigger than half a coconut shell, coated with something to block up the holes and make it float. A little man, only six inches high, was standing up in it. He had a mass of untidy red hair, into which a few feathers, beads and bits of cloth had been woven. He had a red beard, which was pretty much as bad as the hair. The rest of him that wasn’t covered with blue tattoos was covered with a tiny kilt. And he was waving a fist at her, and shouting:
‘Crivens! Gang awa’ oot o’ here, ye daft wee ninny! ‘Ware the green heid!’
And with that he pulled at a piece of string that was hanging over the side of his boat and a second red-headed man surfaced, gulping air.
‘Nae time for fishin’!’ said the first man, hauling him aboard. The green heid’s coming!’
‘Crivens!’ said the swimmer, water pouring off him. ‘Let’s offski!’
And with that he grabbed one very small oar and, with rapid back and forth movements, made the basket speed away.
‘Excuse me!’ Tiffany shouted. ‘Are you fairies?’
But there was no answer. The little round boat had disappeared in the reeds.
Probably not, Tiffany decided.
Then, to her dark delight, there was a susurrus. There was no wind, but the leaves on the alder bushes by the river bank began to shake and rustle. So did the reeds. They didn’t bend, they just blurred. Everything blurred, as if something had picked up the world and was shaking it. The air fizzed. People whispered behind closed doors . . ..
The water began to bubble, just under the bank. It wasn’t very deep here - it would only have reached Tiffany’s knees if she’d paddled - but it was suddenly darker and greener and, somehow, much deeper . . .
She took a couple of steps backwards just before long skinny arms fountained out of the water and clawed madly at the bank where she had been. For a moment she saw a thin face with long sharp teeth, huge round eyes and dripping green hair like water-weed, and then the thing plunged back into the depths.
By the time the water closed over it Tiffany was already running along the bank to the little beach where Wentworth was making frog pies. She snatched up the child just as a stream of bubbles came around the curve in the bank. Once again the water boiled, the green-haired creature shot up, and the long arms clawed at the mud. Then it screamed, and dropped back into the water.
‘I wanna go-a toy-lut!’ screamed Wentworth.
Tiffany ignored him. She was watching the river with a thoughtful expression.
I’m not scared at all, she thought. How strange. I ought to be scared, but I’m just angry. I mean, I can feel the scared, like a red-hot ball, but the angry isn’t letting it out. . ..
‘Wenny wanna wanna wanna go-a toy-lut!’ Wentworth shrieked.
‘Go on, then.’ said Tiffany, absent-mindedly. The ripples were still sloshing against the bank.
There was no point in telling anyone about this. Everyone would just say ‘What an imagination the child has’ if they were feeling in a good mood, or ‘Don’t tell stories!’ if they weren’t.
She was still very angry. How dare a monster turn up in the river? Especially one so . . .. so . . . ridiculous! Who did it think she was?

This is Tiffany, walking back home. Start with the boots. They are big and heavy boots, much repaired by her father and they’d belonged to various sisters before her; she wore several pairs of socks to keep them on. They are big. Tiffany sometimes feels she is nothing more than a way of moving boots around.
Then there is the dress. It has been owned by many sisters before her and has been taken up, taken out, taken down and taken in by her mother so many times that it really ought to have been taken away. But Tiffany rather likes it. It comes down to her ankles and, whatever colour it had been to start with, is now a milky blue which is, incidentally, exactly the same colour as the butterflies skittering beside the path.
Then there is Tiffany’s face. Light pink, with brown eyes, and brown hair. Nothing special. Her head might strike anyone watching - in a saucer of black water, for example - as being just slightly too big for the rest of her, but perhaps she’d grow into it.
And then go further up, and further, until the track becomes a ribbon and Tiffany and her brother two little dots, and there is her country . . .
They call it the Chalk. Green downlands roll under the hot midsummer sun. From up here, the flocks of sheep, moving slowly, drift over the short turf like clouds on a green sky. Here and there sheepdogs speed over the turf like comets.
And then, as the eyes pull back, it is a long green mound, lying like a great whale on the world . . .
. . . surrounded by the inky rainwater in the saucer.
Miss Tick looked up.
‘That little creature in the boat was a Nac Mac Feegle!’ she said. The most feared of all the fairy races! Even trolls run away from the Wee Free Men! And one of them warned her!’
‘She’s the witch, then, is she?’ said the voice.
‘At that age? Impossible!’ said Miss Tick. There’s been no one to teach her! There’re no witches on the Chalk! It’s too soft. And yet. . .. she wasn’t scared . . .’ The rain had stopped. Miss Tick looked up at the Chalk, rising above the low, wrung-out clouds. It was about five miles away.
‘This child needs watching,’ she said. ‘But chalk’s too soft to grow a witch on . . ..’
Only the mountains were higher than the Chalk. They stood sharp and purple and grey, streaming long trails of snow from their tops even in summer. ‘Brides o’ the sky’, Granny Aching had called them once, and it was so rare that she ever said anything at all, let alone anything that wasn’t to do with sheep, that Tiffany had remembered it. Besides, it was exactly right. That’s what the mountains looked like in the winter, when they were all in white and the snow streams blew like veils.
Granny used old words, and came out with odd, old sayings. She didn’t call the downland the Chalk, she called it ‘the wold’. Up on the wold the wind blows cold, Tiffany had thought, and the word had stuck that way.
She arrived at the farm.
People tended to leave Tiffany alone. There was nothing particularly cruel or unpleasant about this, but the farm was big and everyone had their jobs to do, and she did hers very well and so she became, in a way, invisible. She was the dairymaid, and good at it. She made better butter than her mother did, and people commented about how good she was with cheese. It was a talent. Sometimes, when the wandering teachers came to the village, she went and got a bit of education. But mostly she worked in the dairy, which was dark and cool. She enjoyed it. It meant she was doing something for the farm.
It was actually called the Home Farm. Her father rented it from the Baron, who owned the land, but there had been Achings farming it for hundreds of years and so, her father said (quietly, sometimes, after he’d had a beer in the evenings), as far as the land knew, it was owned by the Achings. Tiffany’s mother used to tell him not to speak like that, although the Baron was always very respectful to Mr Aching since Granny had died two years ago, calling him the finest shepherd in these hills, and was generally held by the people in the village to be not too bad these days. It paid to be respectful, said Tiffany’s mother, and the poor man had sorrows of his own.
But sometimes her father insisted that there had been Achings (or Akins, or Archens, or Akens, or Akenns - spelling had been optional) mentioned in old documents about the area for hundreds and hundreds of years. They had these hills in their bones, he said, and they’d always been shepherds.
Tiffany felt quite proud of this, in an odd way, because it might also be nice to be proud of the fact that your ancestors moved around a bit, too, or occasionally tried new things. But you’ve got to be proud of something. And for as long as she could remember she’d heard her father, an otherwise quiet, slow man, make the Joke, the one that must have been handed down from Aching to Aching for hundreds of years.
He’d say, ‘Another day of work and I’m still Aching’, or ‘I get up Aching and I go to bed Aching’, or even ‘I’m Aching all over’. They weren’t particularly funny after about the third time, but she’d miss it if he didn’t say at least one of them every week. They didn’t have to be funny, they were father jokes. Anyway, however they were spelled, all her ancestors had been Aching to stay, not Aching to leave.
There was no one around in the kitchen. Her mother had probably gone up to the shearing pens with a bite of lunch for the men, who were shearing this week. Her sisters Hannah and Fastidia were up there too, rolling fleeces and paying attention to some of the younger men. They were always quite keen to work during shearing.
Near the big black stove was the shelf that was still called Granny Aching’s Library by her mother, who liked the idea of having a library. Everyone else called it Granny’s Shelf.
It was a small shelf, since the books were wedged between a jar of crystallized ginger and the china shepherdess that Tiffany had won at a fair when she was six.
There were only five books if you didn’t include the big farm diary, which in Tiffany’s view didn’t count as a real book because you had to write it yourself. There was the dictionary. There was the Almanack, which got changed every year. And next to that was Diseases of the Sheep, which was fat with the bookmarks that her grandmother had put there.
Granny Aching had been an expert on sheep, even though she called them ‘just bags of bones, eyeballs and teeth, lookin’ for new ways to die’. Other shepherds would walk miles to get her to come and cure their beasts of ailments. They said she had the Touch, although she just said that the best medicine for sheep or man was a dose of turpentine, a good cussin’ and a kick. Bits of paper with Granny’s own recipes for sheep cures stuck out all over the book. Mostly they involved turpentine, but some included cussin’.
Next to the book on sheep was a thin little volume called Flowers of the Chalk. The turf of the downs was full of tiny, intricate flowers, like cowslips and harebells, and even smaller ones that somehow survived the grazing. On the Chalk, flowers had to be tough and cunning to survive the sheep and the winter blizzards.
Someone had coloured in the pictures of the flowers, a long time ago. On the flyleaf of the book was written in neat handwriting ‘Sarah Grizzel’, which had been Granny’s name before she was married. She probably thought that Aching was at least better than Grizzel.
And finally there was The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales, so old that it belonged to an age when there were far more ‘e’s around.
Tiffany stood on a chair and took it down. She turned the pages until she found the one she was looking for, and stared at it for a while. Then she put the book back, replaced the chair, and opened the crockery cupboard.
She found a soup plate, went over to a drawer, took out the tape measure her mother used for dressmaking, and measured the plate.
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Eight inches. Why didn’t they just say!’
She unhooked the largest frying pan, the one that could cook breakfast for half a dozen people all at once, and took some sweets from the jar on the dresser and put them in an old paper bag. Then, to Wentworth’s sullen bewilderment, she took him by a sticky hand and headed back down towards the stream.
Things still looked very normal down there, but she was not going to let that fool her. All the trout had fled and the birds weren’t singing.
She found a place on the river bank with the right-sized bush. Then she hammered a piece of wood into the ground as hard as she could, close to the edge of the water, and tied the bag of sweets to it.
‘Sweeties, Wentworth,’ she shouted.
She gripped the frying pan and stepped smartly behind the bush.
Wentworth trotted over to the sweets and tried to pick up the bag. It wouldn’t move.
‘I wanna go-a toy-lut!’ he yelled, because it was a threat that usually worked. His fat fingers scrabbled at the knots.
Tiffany watched the water carefully. Was it getting darker? Was it getting greener? Was that just water-weed down there? Were those bubbles just a trout, laughing?
No.
She ran out of her hiding place with the frying pan swinging like a bat. The screaming monster, leaping out of the water, met the frying pan coming the other way with a clang.
It was a good clang, with the oiyoiyoioioioioioi-nnnnnggggggg that is the mark of a clang well done.
The creature hung there for a moment, a few teeth and bits of green weed splashing into the water, then slid down slowly and sank with some massive bubbles.
The water cleared and was once again the same old river, shallow and icy cold and floored with pebbles.
‘Wanna wanna sweeties,' screamed Wentworth, who never noticed anything else in the presence of sweets.
Tiffany undid the string and gave them to him. He ate them far too quickly, as he always did with sweets. She waited until he was sick, and then went back home in a thoughtful state of mind.
In the reeds, quite low down, small voices whispered:
‘Crivens, Wee Bobby, didyer no’ see that?
‘Aye. We’d better offski an’ tell the Big Man we’ve found the hag.’
Miss Tick was running up the dusty road. Witches don’t like to be seen running. It looks unprofessional. It’s also not done to be seen carrying things, and she had her tent on her back.
She was also trailing clouds of steam. Witches dry out from the inside.
‘It had all those teeth!’ said the mystery voice, this time from her hat.
‘I know!’ snapped Miss Tick.
‘And she just hauled off and hit it!’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘Just like that!’
‘Yes. Very impressive,’ said Miss Tick. She was getting out of breath. Besides, they were already on the lower slopes of the downs now, and she wasn’t good on chalk. A wandering witch likes firm ground under her, not a rock so soft you could cut it with a knife.
‘Impressive?’ said the voice. ‘She used her brother as bait!’
‘Amazing, wasn’t it?’ said Miss Tick. ‘Such quick thinking . . .. oh, no . . .’ She stopped running, and leaned against a field wall as a wave of dizziness hit her.
‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’ said the voice from the hat. ‘I nearly fell off!’
‘It’s this wretched chalk! I can feel it already! I can do magic on honest soil, and rock is always fine, and I’m not too bad on clay, even . . . but chalk’s neither one thing nor the other! I’m very sensitive to geology, you know.’
‘What are you trying to tell me?’ said the voice.
‘Chalk . . . is a hungry soil. I don’t really have much power on chalk.’
The owner of the voice, who was hidden, said: ‘Are you going to fall over?’
‘No, no! It’s just the magic that doesn’t work .. . .’
Miss Tick did not look like a witch. Most witches don’t, at least the ones who wander from place to place. Looking like a witch can be dangerous when you walk among the uneducated. And for that reason she didn’t wear any occult jewellery, or have a glowing magical knife or a silver goblet with a pattern of skulls all round it, or carry a broomstick with sparks coming out of it, all of which are tiny hints that there may be a witch around. Her pockets never carried anything more magical than a few twigs, maybe a piece of string, a coin or two and, of course, a lucky charm.
Everyone in the country carried lucky charms, and Miss Tick had worked out that if you didn’t have one people would suspect that you were a witch. You had to be a bit cunning to be a witch.
Miss Tick did have a pointy hat, but it was a stealth hat and only pointed when she wanted it to.
The only thing in her bag that might have made anyone suspicious was a very small, grubby booklet entitled ‘An Introduction to Escapology’, by The Great Williamson. If one of the risks of your job is being thrown into a pond with your hands tied together, then the ability to swim thirty yards under water, fully clothed, plus the ability to lurk under the weeds breathing air through a hollow reed counts as nothing if you aren’t also amazingly good with knots.
‘You can’t do magic here?’ said the voice in the hat.
‘No, I can’t,’ said Miss Tick.
She looked up at the sounds of jingling. A strange procession was coming up the white road. It was mostly made up of donkeys pulling small carts with brightly painted covers on them. People walked alongside the carts, dusty to the waist. They were mostly men, they wore bright robes - or robes, at least, that had been bright before being trailed through mud and dust for years - and every one of them wore a strange black square hat.
Miss Tick smiled.
They looked like tinkers, but there wasn’t one amongst them, she knew, who could mend a kettle. What they did was sell invisible things. And after they’d sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but often didn’t want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked.
‘I can’t do,’ said Miss Tick, straightening up. ‘But I can teach!’
Tiffany worked for the rest of the morning in the dairy. There was cheese that needed doing.
There was bread and jam for lunch. Her mother said: ‘The teachers are coming to town today. You can go, if you’ve done your chores.’
Tiffany agreed that, yes, there were one or two things she’d quite like to know more about.
‘Then you can have half a dozen carrots and an egg. I dare say they could do with an egg, poor things,’ said her mother.
Tiffany took them with her after lunch, and went to get an egg’s worth of education.
Most boys in the village grew up to do the same jobs as their fathers or, at least, some other job somewhere in the village where someone’s father would teach them as they went along. The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody’s wife. They were also expected to be able to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the boys.
However, everyone also felt that there were a few other things that even the boys ought to know, to stop them wasting time wondering about details like ‘What’s on the other side of the mountains?’ and ‘How come rain falls out of the sky?’
Every family in the village bought a copy of the Almanack every year, and a sort of education came from that. It was big and thick and printed somewhere far off, and it had lots of details about things like phases of the moon and the right time to plant beans. It also contained a few prophecies about the coming year, and mentioned faraway places with names like Klatch and Hersheba. Tiffany had seen a picture of Klatch in the Almanack. It showed a camel standing in a desert. She’d only found out what both those things were because her mother had told her. And that was Klatch, a camel in a desert. She’d wondered if there wasn’t a bit more to it, but it seemed that ‘Klatch = camel, desert’ was all anyone knew.
And that was the trouble. If you didn’t find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions.
The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth pedlars, fortune-tellers and all the other travellers who sold things people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful.
They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travellers, and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like ‘corrugated iron’. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the maths teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.
People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.
Today the brightly coloured little booths and tents were pitched in a field just outside the village. Behind them small square areas had been fenced off with high canvas walls and were patrolled by apprentice teachers looking for anyone trying to overhear Education without paying. The first tent Tiffany saw had a sign which said:

Jograffy!
Jograffy!
Jograffy!
For today only: all major land masses and oceans
PLUS everything you need to know about glassiers!
One penny or All Major Vejtables Acsepted!

Tiffany had read enough to know that, while he might be a whiz at major land masses, this particular teacher could have done with some help from the man running the stall next door:

The Wonders of Punctuation and Spelling

1-Absolute Certainty about the Comma
2 – I before E Completely Sorted Out
3 – The Mystery of the Semi-Colon Revealed
4 – See the Ampersand (Small extra charge)
5 – Fun with Brackets

Will accept vegetables, eggs and clean used clothing

The next stall along was decorated with scenes out of history, generally of kings cutting one another’s heads off and similar interesting highlights. The teacher in front was dressed in ragged red robes, with rabbitskin trimmings, and wore an old top hat with flags stuck in it. He had a small megaphone which he aimed at Tiffany.
‘The Death of Kings Through the Ages?’ he said. ‘Very educational, lots of blood!’
‘Not really,’ said Tiffany.
‘Oh, you’ve got to know where you’ve come from, miss,’ said the teacher. ‘Otherwise how will you know where you’re going?’
‘I come from a long line of Aching people,’ said Tiffany. ‘And I think I’m moving on.’
She found what she was looking for at a booth hung with pictures of animals including, she was pleased to see, a camel.
The sign said: Useful Creatures. Today: Our Friend the Hedgehog.
She wondered how useful the thing in the river had been, but this looked like the only place to find out. A few children were waiting on the benches inside the booth for the lesson to begin, but the teacher was still standing out in front, in the hope of filling up the empty spaces.
‘Hello, little girl,’ he said, which was only his first big mistake. ‘I’m sure you want to know all about hedgehogs, eh?’
‘I did this one last summer,’ said Tiffany.
The man looked closer, and his grin faded. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I remember. You asked all those . . . little questions.’
‘I would like a question answered today,’ said Tiffany.
‘Provided it’s not the one about how you get baby hedgehogs,’ said the man.
‘No,’ said Tiffany, patiently. ‘It’s about zoology.’
‘Zoology, eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it.’
‘No, actually it isn’t,’ said Tiffany. ‘Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.’
The teacher’s eyes narrowed further. Children like Tiffany were bad news. ‘I can see you’re a clever one,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know any teachers of zoology in these parts. Vetin’ry, yes, but not zoology. Any particular animal?’
‘Jenny Green-Teeth. A water-dwelling monster with big teeth and claws and eyes like soup plates,’ said Tiffany.
‘What size of soup plates? Do you mean big soup plates, a whole full portion bowl with maybe some biscuits, possibly even a bread roll, or do you mean the little cup you might get if, for example, you just ordered soup and a salad?’
The size of soup plates that are eight inches across,’ said Tiffany, who’d never ordered soup and a salad anywhere in her life. ‘I checked.’
‘Hmm, that is a puzzler,’ said the teacher. ‘Don’t think I know that one. It’s certainly not useful, I know that. It sounds made-up to me.’
‘Yes, that’s what I thought,’ said Tiffany. ‘But I’d still like to know more about it.’
‘Well, you could try her. She’s new.’
The teacher jerked his thumb towards a little tent at the end of the row. It was black and quite shabby. There weren’t any posters, and absolutely no exclamation marks.
‘What does she teach?’ she asked.
‘Couldn’t say,’ said the teacher. ‘She says it’s thinking, but I don’t know how you teach that. That’ll be one carrot, thank you.’
When she went closer Tiffany saw a small notice pinned to the outside of the tent. It said, in letters which whispered rather than shouted:

I CAN TEACH YOU A LESSON YOU WON’T FORGET IN A HURRY

Chapter 2
Miss Tick

Tiffany read the sign and smiled.
‘Aha,’ she said. There was nothing to knock on, so she added ‘Knock, knock’ in a louder voice.
A woman’s voice from within said: ‘Who’s there?’
“Tiffany,’ said Tiffany.
‘Tiffany who?’ said the voice.
‘Tiffany who isn’t trying to make a joke.’
‘Ah. That sounds promising. Come in.’
She pushed aside the flap. It was dark inside the tent, as well as stuffy and hot. A skinny figure sat behind a small table. She had a very sharp, thin nose and was wearing a large black straw hat with paper flowers on it. It was completely unsuitable for a face like that.
‘Are you a witch?’ said Tiffany. ‘I don’t mind if you are.'
‘What a strange question to spring on someone,’ said the woman, looking slightly shocked. ‘Your baron bans witches in this country, you know that, and the first thing you say to me is “Are you a witch?”
'Why would I be a witch?’
‘Well, you’re wearing all black,’ said Tiffany.
‘Anyone can wear black,’ said the woman. ‘That doesn’t mean a thing.’
‘And you’re wearing a straw hat with flowers in it,’ Tiffany went on.
‘Aha!’ said the woman. ‘That proves it, then. Witches wear tall pointy hats. Everyone knows that, foolish child.’
‘Yes, but witches are also very clever,’ said Tiffany calmly. There was something about the twinkle in the woman’s eyes that told her to carry on. ‘They sneak about. Probably they often don’t look like witches. And a witch coming here would know about the Baron and so she’d wear the kind of hat that everyone knows witches don’t wear.’
The woman stared at her. That was an incredible feat of reasoning,’ she said at last. ‘You’d make a good witch-finder. You know they used to set fire to witches? Whatever kind of hat I’ve got on, you’d say it proves I’m a witch, yes?’
‘Well, the frog sitting on your hat is a bit of a clue, too,’ said Tiffany.
‘I’m a toad, actually,’ said the creature, which had been peering at Tiffany from between the paper flowers.
‘You’re very yellow for a toad.’
‘I’ve been a bit ill,’ said the toad.
‘And you talk,’ said Tiffany.
‘You only have my word for it,’ said the toad, disappearing into the paper flowers. ‘You can’t prove anything.’
‘You don’t have matches on you, do you?’ said the woman to Tiffany.
‘No.’
‘Fine, fine. Just checking.’
Again, there was a pause while the woman gave Tiffany a long stare, as if making up her mind about something.
‘My name,’ she said at last, ‘is Miss Tick. And I am a witch. It’s a good name for a witch, of course.’
‘You mean blood-sucking parasite?’ said Tiffany, wrinkling her forehead.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Miss Tick, coldly.
‘Ticks,’ said Tiffany. ‘Sheep get them. But if you use turpentine—’
‘I meant that it sounds like “mystic”,’ said Miss Tick.
‘Oh, you mean a pune, or play on words,’ said Tiffany.* ‘In that case it would be even better if you were Miss Teak, a hard foreign wood, because that would sound like “mystique”, or you could be Miss Take, which would—’

* Tiffany had read lots of words in the dictionary that she’d never heard spoken, so she had to guess at how they were pronounced.

‘I can see we’re going to get along like a house on fire,’ said Miss Tick. There may be no survivors.’
‘You really are a witch?’
‘Oh, pur-lease,’ said Miss Tick. ‘Yes, yes, I am a witch. I have a talking animal, a tendency to correct other people’s pronunciation - it’s pun, by the way, not “pune” - and a fascination for poking my nose into other people’s affairs and, yes, a pointy hat.’
‘Can I operate the spring now?’ said the toad.
‘Yes,’ said Miss Tick, her eyes still on Tiffany. ‘You can operate the spring.’
‘I like operating the spring,’ said the toad, crawling around to the back of the hat.
There was a click, and a slow thwap-thwap noise, and the centre of the hat rose slowly and jerkily up out of the paper flowers, which fell away.
‘Er . . .’ said Tiffany.
‘You have a question?’ said Miss Tick.
With a last thwop, the top of the hat made a perfect point.
‘How do you know I won’t run away right now and tell the Baron?’ said Tiffany.
‘Because you haven’t the slightest desire to do so,’ said Miss Tick. ‘You’re absolutely fascinated. You want to be a witch, am I right? You probably want to fly on a broomstick, yes?’
‘Oh, yes!’ She’d often dreamed of flying. Miss Tick’s next words brought her down to earth.
‘Really? You like having to wear really, really thick pants? Believe me, if I’ve got to fly I wear two pairs of woollen ones and a canvas pair on the outside which, I may tell you, are not very feminine no matter how much lace you sew on. It can get cold up there. People forget that. And then there’s the bristles. Don’t ask me about the bristles. I will not talk about the bristles.’
‘But can’t you use a keeping-warm spell?’ said Tiffany.
‘I could. But a witch doesn’t do that sort of thing. Once you use magic to keep yourself warm, then you’ll start using it for other things.’
‘But isn’t that what a witch is supposed to—’ Tiffany began.
‘Once you learn about magic, I mean really learn about magic, learn everything you can learn about magic, then you’ve got the most important lesson still to learn,’ said Miss Tick.
‘What’s that?’
‘Not to use it. Witches don’t use magic unless they really have to. It’s hard work and difficult to control. We do other things. A witch pays attention to everything that’s going on. A witch uses her head. A witch is sure of herself. A witch always has a piece of string—’
‘I always do have a piece of string!’ said Tiffany. ‘It’s always handy!’
‘Good. Although there’s more to witchcraft than string. A witch delights in small details. A witch sees through things and round things. A witch sees further than most. A witch sees things from the other side. A witch knows where she is, and when she is. A witch would see Jenny Green-Teeth,’ she added. ‘What happened?’
‘How did you know I saw Jenny Green-Teeth?’
‘I’m a witch. Guess,’ said Miss Tick.
Tiffany looked around the tent. There wasn’t much to see, even now that her eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom. The sounds of the outside world filtered through the heavy material.
‘I think—’
‘Yes?’ said the witch.
‘I think you heard me telling the teacher.’
‘Correct. I just used my ears,’ said Miss Tick, saying nothing at all about saucers of ink. Tell me about this monster with eyes the size of the kind of soup plates that are eight inches across. Where do soup plates come into it?’
‘The monster is mentioned in a book of stories I’ve got,’ explained Tiffany. ‘It said Jenny Green-Teeth has eyes the size of soup plates. There’s a picture, but it’s not a good one. So I measured a soup plate, so I could be exact.’
Miss Tick put her chin on her hand and gave Tiffany an odd sort of smile.
‘That was all right, wasn’t it?’ said Tiffany.
‘What? Oh, yes. Yes. Um . .. . yes. Very . . . exact. Go on.’
Tiffany told her about the fight with Jenny, although she didn’t mention Wentworth in case Miss Tick got funny about it. Miss Tick listened carefully.
‘Why the frying pan?’ she said. ‘You could’ve found a stick.’
‘A frying pan just seemed a better idea,’ said Tiffany.
‘Hah! It was. Jenny would’ve eaten you up if you’d used a stick. A frying pan is made of iron. Creatures of that kidney can’t stand iron.’
‘But it’s a monster out of a storybook!’ said Tiffany. ‘What’s it doing turning up in our little river?’
Miss Tick stared at Tiffany for a while, and then said: ‘Why do you want to be a witch, Tiffany?’
It had started with The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales.. Actually, it had probably started with a lot of things, but the stories most of all.
Her mother had read them to her when she was little, and then she’d read them to herself. And all the stories had, somewhere, the witch. The wicked old witch.
And Tiffany had thought: Where’s the evidence?
The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you had no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch.
If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about ‘a handsome prince’ . . . was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called him handsome? As for ‘a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long’ .. . . well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories didn’t want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told . . .
And you were told that the old witch lived all by herself in a strange cottage made of gingerbread or which ran around on giant hen’s feet, and talked to animals, and could do magic.
Tiffany only ever knew one old woman who lived all alone in a strange cottage . . ..
Well, no. That wasn’t quite true. But she had only ever known one old woman who lived in a strange house that moved about, and that was Granny Aching. And she could do magic, sheep magic, and she talked to animals and there was nothing wicked about her. That proved you couldn’t believe the stories.
And there had been the other old woman, the one who everyone said was a witch. And what had happened to her had made Tiffany very . .. . thoughtful.
Anyway, she preferred the witches to the smug handsome princes and especially to the stupid smirking princesses, who didn’t have the sense of a beetle. They had lovely golden hair, too, and Tiffany didn’t. Her hair was brown, plain brown. Her mother called it chestnut, or sometimes auburn, but Tiffany knew it was brown, brown, brown, just like her eyes. Brown as earth. And did the book have any adventures for people who had brown eyes and brown hair? No, no, no . . . it was the blond people with blue eyes and the redheads with green eyes who got the stories. If you had brown hair you were probably just a servant or a woodcutter or something. Or a dairymaid. Well, that was not going to happen, even if she was good at cheese. She couldn’t be the prince, and she’d never be a princess, and she didn’t want to be a woodcutter, so she’d be the witch and know things, just like Granny Aching—
‘Who was Granny Aching?’ said a voice.
Who was Granny Aching? People would start asking that now. And the answer was: what Granny Aching was, was there. She was always there. It seemed that the lives of all the Achings revolved around Granny Aching. Down in the village decisions were made, things were done, life went on in the knowledge that in her old wheeled shepherding hut on the hills Granny Aching was there, watching.
And she was the silence of the hills. Perhaps that’s why she liked Tiffany, in her awkward, hesitant way. Her older sisters chattered, and Granny didn’t like noise. Tiffany didn’t make noise when she was up at the hut. She just loved being there. She’d watch the buzzards, and listen to the noise of the silence.
It did have a noise, up there. Sounds, voices, animal noises floating up onto the downs, somehow made the silence deep and complex. And Granny Aching wrapped this silence around herself and made room inside it for Tiffany. It was always too busy on the farm. There were a lot of people with a lot to do. There wasn’t enough time for silence. There wasn’t time for listening. But Granny Aching was silent and listened all the time.
‘What?’ said Tiffany, blinking.
‘You just said “Granny Aching listened to me all the time”,’ said Miss Tick.
Tiffany swallowed. ‘I think my grandmother was slightly a witch,’ she said, with a touch of pride.
‘Really? How do you know?’
‘Well, witches can curse people, right?’ said Tiffany.
‘So it is said,’ said Miss Tick, diplomatically.
‘Well, my father said Granny Aching cussed the sky blue,’ said Tiffany.
Miss Tick coughed. ‘Well, cussing, now, cussing isn’t like genuine cursing. Cussing’s more like dang and botheration and darned and drat, you know? Cursing is more on the lines of “I hope your nose explodes and your ears go flying away.”‘
‘I think Granny’s cussing was a bit more than that,’ said Tiffany, in a very definite voice. ‘And she talked to her dogs.’
‘And what kind of things did she say to them?’ said Miss Tick.
‘Oh, things like come by and away to me and that’ll do,’ said Tiffany. They always did what she told them.’
‘But those are just sheepdog commands,’ said Miss Tick, dismissively. That’s not exactly witchcraft.’
‘Well, that still makes them familiars, doesn’t it?’ Tiffany retorted, feeling annoyed. ‘Witches have animals they can talk to, called familiars. Like your toad there.’
‘I’m not familiar,’ said a voice from among the paper flowers. ‘I’m just slightly presumptuous.’
‘And she knew about all kinds of herbs,’ Tiffany persisted. Granny Aching was going to be a witch even if Tiffany had to argue all day. ‘She could cure anything. My father said she could make a shepherd’s pie stand up and baa.' Tiffany lowered her voice. ‘She could bring lambs back to life . . .’
You hardly ever saw Granny Aching indoors in the spring and summer. She spent most of the year sleeping in the old wheeled hut, which could be dragged across the downs after the flocks. But the first time Tiffany could remember seeing the old woman in the farmhouse, she was kneeling in front of the fire, putting a dead lamb in the big black oven.
Tiffany had screamed and screamed. And Granny had gently picked her up, a little awkwardly, and sat her on her lap and shushed her and called her ‘my little jiggit’, while on the floor her sheepdogs, Thunder and Lightning, watched her in doggish amazement. Granny wasn’t particularly at home around children, because they didn’t baa.
When Tiffany had stopped crying out of sheer lack of breath, Granny had put her down on the rug and opened the oven, and Tiffany had watched the lamb come alive again.
When Tiffany got a little older, she found out that ‘jiggit’ meant twenty in the Van Tan Tethera, the ancient counting language of the shepherds. The older people still used it when they were counting things they thought of as special. She was Granny Aching’s twentieth grandchild.
And when she was older she also understood all about the warming oven, which never got more than, well, warm. Her mother would let the bread dough rise in it, and Ratbag the cat would sleep in it, sometimes on the dough. It was just the place to revive a weak lamb that had been born on a snowy night and was near death from the cold. That was how it worked. No magic at all. But that time it had been magic. And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.
‘Good, but still not exactly witchcraft,’ said Miss Tick, breaking the spell again. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to have a witch ancestor to be a witch. It helps, of course, because of heredity.'
‘You mean like having talents?’ said Tiffany, wrinkling her brow.
‘Partly, I suppose,’ said Miss Tick. ‘But I was thinking of pointy hats, for example. If you have a grandmother who can pass on her pointy hat to you, that saves a great deal of expense. They are incredibly hard to come by, especially ones strong enough to withstand falling farmhouses. Did Mrs Aching have anything like that?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Tiffany. ‘She hardly ever wore a hat except in the very cold weather. She wore an old grain sack as a sort of hood. Um . . . does that count?’
For the first time, Miss Tick looked a little less flinty. ‘Possibly, possibly,’ she said. ‘Do you have any brothers and sisters, Tiffany?’
‘I have six sisters,’ said Tiffany. I’m the youngest. Most of them don’t live with us now.’
‘And then you weren’t the baby any more because you had a dear little brother,’ said Miss Tick. The only boy, too. That must have been a nice surprise.’
Suddenly, Tiffany found Miss Tick’s faint smile slightly annoying.
‘How do you know about my brother?’ she said.
The smile faded. Miss Tick thought: This child is sharp. ‘Just a guess,’ she said. No one likes admitting to spying.
‘Are you using persykology on me?’ said Tiffany hotly.
‘I think you mean psychology,’ said Miss Tick.
‘Whatever,’ said Tiffany. ‘You think I don’t like him because my parents make a fuss of him and spoil him, yes?’
‘Well, it did cross my mind,’ said Miss Tick, and gave up worrying about the spying. She was a witch, and that was all there was to it. ‘I think it was the bit when you used him as bait for a slathering monster that gave me a hint,’ she added.
‘He’s just a nuisance!’ said Tiffany. ‘He takes up my time and I’m always having to look after him and he always wants sweets. Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I had to think fast.’
‘Quite so,’ said Miss Tick.
‘Granny Aching would have done something about monsters in our river,’ said Tiffany, ignoring that. ‘Even if they are out of books.’ And she’d have done something about what happened to old Mrs Snapperly, she added to herself. She’d have spoken up, and people would have listened . . . They always listened when Granny spoke up. Speak up for those who don’t have voices, she always said.
‘Good,’ said Miss Tick. ‘So she should. Witches deal with things. You said the river was very shallow where Jenny leaped up? And the world looked blurred and shaky? Was there a susurrus?’
Tiffany beamed. ‘Yes, there certainly was!’
‘Ah. Something bad is happening.’
Tiffany looked worried.
‘Can I stop it?’
‘And now I’m slightly impressed,’ said Miss Tick. ‘You said, “Can I stop it?”, not “Can anyone stop it?” or “Can we stop it?” That’s good. You accept responsibility. That’s a good start. And you keep a cool head. But, no, you can’t stop it.’
‘I walloped Jenny Green-Teeth!’
‘Lucky hit,’ said Miss Tick. There may be worse than her on the way, believe me. I believe an incursion of major proportions is going to start here and, clever though you are, my girl, you have as much chance as one of your lambs on a snowy night. You keep clear. I’ll try to fetch help.’
‘What, from the Baron?’
‘Good gracious, no. He’d be no use at all.’
‘But he protects us,’ said Tiffany. That’s what my mother says.’
‘Does he?’ said Miss Tick. ‘Who from? I mean, from whom?’
‘Well, from, you know . . . attack, I suppose. From other barons, my father says.’
‘Has he got a big army?’
‘Well, er, he’s got Sergeant Roberts, and Kevin and Neville and Trevor,’ said Tiffany. ‘We all know them. They mostly guard the castle.’
‘Any of them got magical powers?’ said Miss Tick.
‘I saw Neville do card tricks once,’ said Tiffany.
‘A wow at parties, but probably not much use even against something like Jenny,’ said Miss Tick. ‘Are there no oth— Are there no witches here at all?’
Tiffany hesitated.
‘There was old Mrs Snapperly,' she said. Oh, yes. She’d lived all alone in a strange cottage all right. . .
‘Good name,’ said Miss Tick. ‘Can’t say I’ve heard it before, though. Where is she?’
‘She died in the snow last winter,’ said Tiffany, slowly.
‘And now tell me what you’re not telling me,’ said Miss Tick, sharp as a knife.
‘Er . . . she was begging, people think, but no one opened their doors to her and, er . . . it was a cold night, and . . . she died.’
‘And she was a witch, was she?’
‘Everyone said she was a witch,’ said Tiffany. She really did not want to talk about this. No one in the villages around here wanted to talk about it. No one went near the ruins of the cottage in the woods, either.
‘You don’t think so?’
‘Um . . .’ Tiffany squirmed. ‘You see . . . the Baron had a son called Roland. He was only twelve, I think. And he went riding in the woods by himself last summer and his dogs came back without him.’
‘Mrs Snapperly lived in those woods?’ said Miss Tick.
‘Yes.’
‘And people think she killed him?’ said Miss Tick. She sighed. They probably think she cooked him in the oven, or something.’
‘They never actually said,’ said Tiffany. ‘But I think it was something like that, yes.’
‘And did his horse turn up?’ said Miss Tick.
‘No,’ said Tiffany. ‘And that was strange, because if it’d turned up anywhere along the hills the people would have noticed it . . .’
Miss Tick folded her hands, sniffed, and smiled a smile with no humour in it at all.
‘Easily explained,' she said. ‘Mrs Snapperly must have had a really big oven, eh?’
‘No, it was really quite small,’ said Tiffany. ‘Only ten inches deep.’
‘I bet Mrs Snapperly had no teeth and talked to herself, right?’ said Miss Tick.
‘Yes. And she had a cat. And a squint,’ said Tiffany. And it all came out in a rush: ‘And so after he vanished they went to her cottage and they looked in the oven and they dug up her garden and they threw stones at her old cat until it died and they turned her out of her cottage and piled up all her old books in the middle of the room and set fire to them and burned the place to the ground and everyone said she was an old witch.’
‘They burned the books,’ said Miss Tick, in a flat voice.
‘Because they said they had old writing in them,’ said Tiffany. ‘And pictures of stars.’
‘And when you went to look, did they?’ said Miss Tick.
Tiffany suddenly felt cold. ‘How did you know?’ she said.
‘I’m good at listening. Well, did they?’
Tiffany sighed. ‘Yes, I went to the cottage next day and some of the pages, you know, had kind of floated up in the heat. And I found a part of one, and it had all old lettering and gold and blue edging. And I buried her cat.’
‘You buried the cat?’
‘Yes! Someone had to!’ said Tiffany hotly.
‘And you measured the oven,’ said Miss Tick. ‘I know you did, because you just told me what size it was.’ And you measure soup plates, Miss Tick added to herself. What have I found here?
‘Well, yes. I did. I mean .. . . it was tiny! And if she could magic away a boy and a whole horse, why didn’t she magic away the men who came for her? It didn’t make any sense—!’
Miss Tick waved her into silence. ‘And then what happened?’
‘Then the Baron said no one was to have anything to do with her,’ said Tiffany. ‘He said any witches found in the country would be tied up and thrown in the pond. Er, you could be in danger,’ she added, uncertainly.
‘I can untie knots with my teeth and I have a Gold Swimming Certificate from the Quirm College for Young Ladies,’ said Miss Tick. ‘All that practice at jumping into the swimming pool with my clothes on was time well spent.’ She leaned forward. ‘Let me guess what happened to Mrs Snapperly,’ she said. ‘She lived from the summer until the snow, right? She stole food from barns and probably women gave her food at the back door if the men weren’t around? I expect the bigger boys threw things at her if they saw her.’
‘How do you know all this?’ said Tiffany. ‘It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination, believe me,’ said Miss Tick. ‘And she wasn’t a witch, was she?’
‘I think she was just a sick old lady who was no use to anyone and smelled a bit and looked odd because she had no teeth,’ said Tiffany. ‘She just looked like a witch in a story. Anyone with half a mind could see that.’
Miss Tick sighed. ‘Yes. But sometimes it’s so hard to find half a mind when you need one.’
‘Can’t you teach me what I need to know to be a witch?’ said Tiffany.
‘Tell me why you still want to be a witch, bearing in mind what happened to Mrs Snapperly?’
‘So that sort of thing doesn’t happen again,’ said Tiffany.
She even buried the old witch’s cat, thought Miss Tick. What kind of child is this?
‘Good answer. You might make a decent witch one day,’ she said. ‘But I don’t teach people to be witches. I teach people about witches. Witches learn in a special school. I just show them the way, if they’re any good. All witches have special interests, and I like children.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re much easier to fit in the oven,’ said Miss Tick.
But Tiffany wasn’t frightened, just annoyed.
‘That was a nasty thing to say,’ she said.
‘Well, witches don’t have to be nice,’ said Miss Tick, pulling a large black bag from under the table. ‘I’m glad to see you pay attention.’
‘There really is a school for witches?’ said Tiffany.
‘In a manner of speaking, yes,’ said Miss Tick.
‘Where?’
‘Very close.’
‘It is magical?’
‘Very magical.’
‘A wonderful place?’
‘There’s nowhere quite like it.’
‘Can I go there by magic? Does, like, a unicorn turn up to carry me there or something?’
‘Why should it? A unicorn is nothing more than a big horse that comes to a point, anyway. Nothing to get so excited about,’ said Miss Tick. ‘And that will be one egg, please.’
‘Exactly where can I find the school?’ said Tiffany, handing over the egg.
‘Aha. A root vegetable question, I think,’ said Miss Tick. ‘Two carrots, please.'
Tiffany handed them over.
‘Thank you. Ready? To find the school for witches, go to a high place near here, climb to the top, open your eyes . . .' Miss Tick hesitated.
‘Yes?’
‘. . . and then open your eyes again.'
‘But—’ Tiffany began.
‘Got any more eggs?’
‘No, but—’
‘No more education, then. But I have a question to ask you.'
‘Got any eggs?’ said Tiffany, instantly.
‘Hah! Did you see anything else by the river, Tiffany?’
Silence suddenly filled the tent. The sound of bad spelling and erratic geography filtered through from outside as Tiffany and Miss Tick stared into one another’s eyes.
‘No,' lied Tiffany.
‘Are you sure?’ said Miss Tick.
‘Yes.'
They continued the staring match. But Tiffany could outstare a cat.
‘I see,’ said Miss Tick, looking away. ‘Very well. In that case, please tell me . . . when you stopped outside my tent just now you said “Aha” in what I considered to be a smug tone of voice. Were you thinking, This is a strange little black tent with a mysterious little sign on the door, so going inside could be the start of an adventure, or were you thinking, This could be the tent of some wicked witch like they thought Mrs Snapperly was, who’ll put some horrible spell on me as soon as I go in? It’s all right, you can stop staring now. Your eyes are watering.’
‘I thought both those things,’ said Tiffany, blinking.
‘But you came in anyway. Why?’
‘To find out.’
‘Good answer. Witches are naturally nosy,’ said Miss Tick, standing up. ‘Well, I must go. I hope we shall meet again. I will give you some free advice, though.’
‘Will it cost me anything?’
‘What? I just said it was free!’ said Miss Tick.
‘Yes, but my father said that free advice often turns out to be expensive,’ said Tiffany.
Miss Tick sniffed. ‘You could say this advice is priceless,’ she said. ‘Are you listening?’
‘Yes,’ said Tiffany.
‘Good. Now . . .. if you trust in yourself . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘. . . and believe in your dreams . . .'
‘Yes?’
‘. . . and follow your star . . .’ Miss Tick went on.
‘Yes?’
‘. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye.’
The tent seemed to grow darker. It was time to leave. Tiffany found herself back in the square where the other teachers were taking down their stalls.
She didn’t look round. She knew enough not to look around. Either the tent would still be there, which would be a disappointment, or it would have mysteriously disappeared, and that would be worrying.
She headed home, and wondered if she should have mentioned the little red-haired men. She hadn’t for a whole lot of reasons. She wasn’t sure, now, that she’d really seen them; she had a feeling that they wouldn’t have wanted her to; and it was nice to have something Miss Tick didn’t know. Yes. That was the best part. Miss Tick was a bit too clever, in Tiffany’s opinion.
On the way home she climbed to the top of Arken Hill, which was just outside the village. It wasn’t very big, not even as high as the downs above the farm and certainly nothing like as high as the mountains.
The hill was more . . . homely. There was a flat place at the top where nothing ever grew, and Tiffany knew there was a story that a hero had once fought a dragon up there and its blood had burned the ground where it fell. There was another story that said there was a heap of treasure under the hill, defended by the dragon, and another story that said a king was buried there in armour of solid gold. There were lots of stories about the hill; it was surprising it hadn’t sunk under the weight of them.
Tiffany stood on the bare soil and looked at the view.
She could see the village and the river and Home Farm, and the Baron’s castle and, beyond the fields she knew, she could see grey woods and heathlands.
She closed her eyes and opened them again. And blinked, and opened them again.
There was no magic door, no hidden building revealed, no strange signs.
For a moment, though, the air buzzed, and smelled of snow.
When she got home she looked up ‘incursion’ in the dictionary. It meant ‘invasion’.
An incursion of major proportions, Miss Tick had said.
And, now, little unseen eyes watched Tiffany from the top of the shelf. . ..

Chapter 3
Hunt The Hag

Miss Tick removed her hat, reached inside and pulled a piece of string. With little clicks and flapping noises the hat took up the shape of a rather elderly straw hat. She picked up the paper flowers from the ground and stuck them on, carefully.
Then she said: ‘Phew!’
‘You can’t just let the kid go like that,’ said the toad, who was sitting on the table.
‘Like what?’
‘She’s clearly got First Sight and Second Thoughts. That’s a powerful combination.’
‘She’s a little know-it-all,’ said Miss Tick.
‘Right. Just like you. She’s impressed you, right? I know she did because you were quite nasty to her, and you always do that to people who impress you.’
‘Do you want to be turned into a frog?’
‘Well, now, let me see . .. .’ said the toad sarcastically. ‘Better skin, better legs, likelihood of being kissed by a princess one hundred per cent improved . . . why,  yes. Whenever you’re ready, madam.’
‘There’re worse things than being a toad,’ said Miss Tick darkly.
“Try it some time,’ said the toad. ‘Anyway, I rather liked her.’
‘So did I,’ said Miss Tick, briskly. ‘She hears about an old lady dying because these idiots thought she was a witch, and she decides to become a witch so that they don’t try that again. A monster roars up out of her river and she bashes it with a frying pan! Have you ever heard the saying “The land finds its witch”? It’s happened here, I’ll bet. But a chalk witch? Witches like granite and basalt, hard rock all the way down! Do you know what chalk is?’
‘You’re going to tell me,’ said the toad.
‘It’s the shells of billions and billions of tiny, helpless little sea creatures that died millions of years ago,’ said Miss Tick. ‘It’s . . . tiny, tiny bones. Soft. Soggy. Damp. Even limestone is better than that. But . . . she’s grown up on chalk and she is hard, and sharp, too. She’s a born witch. On chalk! Which is impossible!’
‘She bashed Jenny!’ said the toad. The girl has got talent!’
‘Maybe, but she needs more than that. Jenny isn’t clever,’ said Miss Tick. ‘She’s only a Grade One Prohibitory Monster. And she was probably bewildered to find herself in a stream, when her natural home is in stagnant water. There’ll be much, much worse than her.’
‘What do you mean, “a Grade One Prohibitory Monster”?’ asked the toad. ‘I’ve never heard her called that.’
‘I am a teacher as well as a witch,’ said Miss Tick, adjusting her hat carefully. Therefore I make lists. I make assessments. I write things down in a neat, firm hand with pens of two colours. Jenny is one of a number of creatures invented by adults to scare children away from dangerous places.’ She sighed. ‘If only people would think before they make up monsters.’
‘You ought to stay and help her,’ said the toad.
‘I’ve got practically no power here,’ said Miss Tick. ‘I told you. It’s the chalk. And remember the redheaded men. A Nac Mac Feegle spoke to her! Warned her! I’ve never seen one in my life! If she’s got them on her side, who knows what she can do?’
She picked up the toad. ‘D’you know what’ll be turning up?’ she continued. ‘All the things they locked away in those old stories. All those reasons why you shouldn’t stray off the path, or open the forbidden door, or say the wrong word, or spill the salt. All the stories that gave children nightmares. All the monsters from under the biggest bed in the world. Somewhere, all stories are real and all dreams come true. And they’ll come true here if they’re not stopped. If it wasn’t for the Nac Mac Feegle I’d be really worried. As it is, I’m going to try and get some help. That’s going to take me at least two days without a broomstick!’
‘It’s unfair to leave her alone with them,’ said the toad.
‘She won’t be alone,’ said Miss Tick. ‘She’ll have you.’
‘Oh,’ said the toad.
Tiffany shared a bedroom with Fastidia and Hannah. She woke up when she heard them come to bed, and lay in the dark until she heard their breathing settle down and they started to dream of young sheep shearers with their shirts off.
Outside, summer lightning flashed around the hills, and there was a rumble of thunder . .. .
Thunder and Lightning. She knew them as dogs before she knew them as the sound and light of a storm. Granny always had her sheepdogs with her, indoors and out. One moment they would be black and white streaks across the distant turf and then they were suddenly there, panting, eyes never leaving Granny’s face. Half the dogs on the hills were Lightning’s puppies, trained by Granny Aching.
Tiffany had gone with the family to the big Sheepdog Trials. Every shepherd on the Chalk went to them, and the very best entered the arena to show how well they could work their dogs. The dogs would round up sheep, separate them, drive them into the pens - or sometimes run off, or snap at one another, because even the best dog can have a bad day. But Granny never entered with Thunder and Lightning. She’d lean on the fence with the dogs lying in front of her, watching the show intently and puffing her foul pipe. And Tiffany’s father had said that, after each shepherd had worked his dogs, the judges would look nervously across at Granny Aching to see what she thought.
In fact all the shepherds watched her. Granny never, ever entered the arena because she was the Trials. If Granny thought you were a good shepherd - if she nodded at you when you walked out of the arena, if she puffed at her pipe and said ‘that’ll do’ - you walked like a giant for a day, you owned the Chalk . . ..
When she was small and up on the wold with Granny, Thunder and Lightning would baby-sit Tiffany, lying attentively a few feet away as she played. And she’d been so proud when Granny had let her use them to round up a flock. She’d run about excitedly in all directions shouting ‘Come by!’ and ‘There!’ and ‘Walk up!’ and, glory be, the dogs had worked perfectly.
She knew now that they’d have worked perfectly whatever she’d shouted. Granny was just sitting there, smoking her pipe, and by now the dogs could read her mind. They only ever took orders from Granny Aching . . ..
The storm died down after a while and there was the gentle sound of rain.
At some point Ratbag the cat pushed open the door and jumped onto the bed. He was big to start with, but Ratbag flowed. He was so fat that, on any reasonably flat surface, he gradually spread out in a great puddle of fur. He hated Tiffany, but would never let personal feelings get in the way of a warm place to sleep.
She must have slept, because she woke up when she heard the voices.
They seemed very close but, somehow, very small.
‘Crivens! It’s a’ vena well sayin’ “find the hag”, but what should we be lookin ‘for, can ye tell me that? All these bigjobs look just the same tae me!’
‘Not-totally-wee Geordie doon at thefishin’ said she was a big, big girl!’
‘A great help that is, I dinnae think! They ‘re all big, big girls!’
‘Ye pair a dafties! Everyone knows a hag wears a pointy bonnet!’
‘So they canna be a hag if they’re sleepin’, then?’
‘Hello?’ whispered Tiffany.
There was silence, embroidered with the breathing of her sisters. But in a way Tiffany couldn’t quite describe, it was the silence of people trying hard not to make any noise.
She leaned down and looked under the bed. There was nothing there but the guzunder.
The little man in the river had talked just like that.
She lay back in the moonlight, listening until her ears ached.
Then she wondered what the school for witches would be like and why she hadn’t seen it yet.
She knew every inch of the country for two miles around. She liked the river best, with the backwaters where striped pike sunbathed just above the weeds and the banks where kingfishers nested. There was a heronry a mile or so upriver and she liked to creep up on the birds when they came down here to fish in the reeds, because there’s nothing funnier than a heron trying to get airborne in a hurry . . .
She drifted off to sleep again, thinking about the land around the farm. She knew all of it. There were no secret places that she didn’t know about.
But maybe there were magical doors. That’s what she’d make, if she had a magical school. There should be secret doorways everywhere, even hundreds of miles away. Look at a special rock by, say, moonlight, and there would be yet another door.
But the school, now, the school. There would be lessons in broomstick riding and how to sharpen your hat to a point, and magical meals, and lots of new friends.
‘Is the bairn asleep?’
‘Aye, I canna’ hear her movin’.’
Tiffany opened her eyes in the darkness. The voices under the bed had a slightly echoey edge. Thank goodness the guzunder was nice and clean.
‘Right, let’s get oot o’ this wee pot, then.’
The voices moved off across the room. Tiffany’s ears tried to swivel to follow them.
‘Hey, see here, it’s a hoose! See, with wee chairies and things!’
They’ve found the doll’s house, Tiffany thought.
It was quite a large one, made by Mr Block the farm carpenter when Tiffany’s oldest sister, who already had two babies of her own now, was a little girl. It wasn’t the most fragile of items. Mr Block did not go in for delicate work. But over the years the girls had decorated it with bits of material and some rough and ready furniture.
By the sound of it the owners of the voices thought it was a palace.
‘Hey, hey, hey, we’re in the cushy stuff noo! There’s a beid in this room. Wi’ pillows!’
‘Keep it doon, we don’t want any o’ them to wake up!’ ‘Crivens, I’m as quiet as a wee moose! Aargh! There’s sojers!’
‘Whut d’ye mean, sojers?’
‘There’s redcoats in the room!’
They’ve found the toy soldiers, thought Tiffany, trying not to breathe loudly.
Strictly speaking, they had no place in the doll’s house, but Wentworth wasn’t old enough for them and so they’d got used as innocent bystanders back in those days when Tiffany had made tea parties for her dolls. Well, what passed for dolls. Such toys as there were in the farmhouse had to be tough to survive intact through the generations and didn’t always manage it. Last time Tiffany had tried to arrange a party, the guests had been a rag doll with no head, two wooden soldiers and three-quarters of a small teddy bear.
Thuds and bangs came from the direction of the doll’s house.
'I got one! Hey, pal, can yer mammie sew? Stitch this! Aargh! He’s got a held on him like a tree!’
‘Crivens! There’s a body here wi’ no held at a’ I’
‘Aye, nae wonder, ‘cos here’s a bear! Feel ma boot, ye washoon!’
It seemed to Tiffany that although the owners of the three voices were fighting things that couldn’t possibly fight back, including a teddy bear with only one leg, the fight still wasn’t going all one way.
‘I got ‘im! I got ‘im! I got ‘im! Yer gonna get a gummer, yer wee hard disease!’
‘Someone bit ma leg! Someone bit ma leg!’
‘Come here! Ach, yerfightin’ yersels, ye eejits! Ah ‘m fed up wi’ the pair a yees!’
Tiffany felt Ratbag stir. He might be fat and lazy, but he was lightning fast when it came to leaping on small creatures. She couldn’t let him get the . . . whatever they were, however bad they sounded.
She coughed loudly.
‘See?’ said a voice from the doll’s house. ‘Yer woked them up! Ah ‘m offski!’
Silence fell again and this time, Tiffany decided after a while, it was the silence of no one there rather than the silence of people being incredibly quiet. Ratbag went back to sleep, twitching occasionally as he disembowelled something in his fat cat dreams.
Tiffany waited a little while and then got out of bed and crept towards the bedroom door, avoiding the two squeaky floorboards. She went downstairs in the dark, found a chair by moonlight, fished the book of Faerie Tales off Granny’s shelf, then lifted the latch on the back door and stepped out into the warm midsummer night.
There was a lot of mist around, but a few stars were visible overhead and there was a gibbous moon in the sky. Tiffany knew it was gibbous because she’d read in the Almanack that ‘gibbous’ meant what the moon looked like when it was just a bit fatter than half full, and so she made a point of paying attention to it around those times just so that she could say to  herself:   ‘Ah,  I see  the  moon’s  very gibbous tonight . . .’
It’s possible that this tells you more about Tiffany than she would want you to know.
Against the rising moon the downs were a black wall that filled half the sky. For a moment she looked for the light of Granny Aching’s lantern . . .
Granny never lost a lamb. That was one of Tiffany’s first memories: of being held by her mother at the window one frosty night in early spring, with a million brilliant stars glinting over the mountains and, on the darkness of the downs, the one yellow star in the constellation of Granny Aching, zigzagging through the night. She wouldn’t go to bed while a lamb was lost, however bad the weather. . ..
There was only one place where it was possible for someone in a large family to be private, and that was in the privy. It was a three-holer, and it was where everyone went if they wanted to be alone for a while. There was a candle in there, and last year’s Almanack hanging on a string. The printers knew their readership, and printed the Almanack on soft thin paper.
Tiffany lit the candle, made herself comfortable, and looked at the book of Faerie Tales. The moon gibbous’d at her through the crescent-shaped hole cut in the door.
She’d never really liked the book. It seemed to her that it tried to tell her what to do and what to think. Don’t stray from the path, don’t open that door, but hate the wicked witch because she is wicked. Oh, and believe that shoe size is a good way of choosing a wife.
A lot of the stories were highly suspicious, in her opinion. There was the one that ended when the two good children pushed the wicked witch into her own oven. Tiffany had worried about that after all that trouble with Mrs Snapperly. Stories like this stopped people thinking properly, she was sure. She’d read that one and thought, Excuse me? No one has an oven big enough to get a whole person in, and what made the children think they could just walk around eating people’s houses in any case? And why does some boy too stupid to know a cow is worth a lot more than five beans have the right to murder a giant and steal all his gold? Not to mention commit an act of ecological vandalism? And some girl who can’t tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother must either have been as dense as teak or come from an extremely ugly family. The stories weren‘t real. But Mrs Snapperly had died because of stories.
She flicked past page after page, looking for the right pictures. Because, although the stories made her angry, the pictures, ah, the pictures were the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.
She turned a page and there it was.
Most of the pictures of fairies were not very impressive. Frankly, they looked like a small girls’ ballet class that’d just had to run through a bramble patch. But this one . . . was different. The colours were strange, and there were no shadows. Giant grasses and daisies grew everywhere, so the fairies must have been quite small, but they looked big. They looked like rather strange humans. They certainly didn’t look much like fairies. Hardly any of them had wings. They were odd shapes, in fact. In fact, some of them looked like monsters. The girls in the tutus wouldn’t have stood much chance.
And the odd thing was that, alone of all the pictures in the book, this one looked as if it had been done by an artist who had painted what was in front of him. The other pictures, the ballet girls and the romper-suit babies, had a made-up, syrupy look. This one didn’t. This one said that the artist had been there . . .
. . . at least in his head, Tiffany thought.
She concentrated on the bottom left-hand corner, and there it was. She’d seen it before, but you had to know where to look. It was definitely a little red-haired man, naked except for a kilt and a skinny waistcoat, scowling out of the picture. He looked very angry. And .. . . Tiffany moved the candle to see more clearly . . .. he was definitely making a gesture with his hand.
Even if you didn’t know it was a rude one, it was easy to guess.
She heard voices. She pushed the door open with her foot to hear them better, because a witch always listens to other people’s conversations.
The sound was coming from the other side of the hedge, where there was a field that should have been full of nothing but sheep, waiting to go to market. Sheep are not known for their conversation. She snuck out carefully in the misty dawn and found a small gap that had been made by rabbits, which just gave her a good enough view.
There was a ram grazing near the hedge and the conversation was coming from it or, rather, somewhere in the long grass underneath it. There seemed to be at least four speakers, who sounded bad-tempered.
‘Crivens! We wanna coo beastie, no’ a ship beastie!’
‘Ach, one’s as goo’ as t’other! C’mon, lads, a’ grab a holt o’ aleg!’
‘Aye, all the coos are inna shed, we tak’ what we can!’
‘Keep it doon, keep it doon, will ya!’
‘Ach, who’s listnin’? OK, lads - yan . . .. tan . . .. teth ‘ra!’
The sheep rose a little in the air, and bleated in alarm as it started to go across the field backwards. Tiffany thought she saw a hint of red hair in the grass around its legs, but that vanished as the ram was carried away into the mist.
She pushed her way through the hedge, ignoring the twigs that scratched at her. Granny Aching wouldn’t have let anyone get away with stealing a sheep, even if they were invisible.
But the mist was thick and, now, Tiffany heard noises from the henhouse.
The disappearing-backwards sheep could wait. Now the hens needed her. A fox had got in twice in the last two weeks and the hens that hadn’t been taken were barely laying.
Tiffany ran through the garden, catching her nightdress on pea sticks and gooseberry bushes, and flung open the henhouse door.
There were no flying feathers, and nothing like the panic a fox would cause. But the chickens were clucking excitedly and Prunes, the cockerel, was strutting nervously up and down. One of the hens looked a bit embarrassed. Tiffany lifted it up quickly. There were two tiny blue, red-haired men underneath. They were each holding an egg, clasped in their arms. They looked up with very guilty expressions.
‘Ach,  no!’  said  one.   ‘It’s  the  bairn!  She’s the hag. . .’
‘You’re stealing our eggs,’ said Tiffany. ‘How dare you! And I’m not a hag!’
The little men looked at one another, and then at the eggs.
‘Whut eiggs?’ said one.
‘The eggs you are holding,’ said Tiffany, meaningfully.
‘Whut? Oh, these? These are eiggs, are they?’ said the one who’d spoken first, looking at the eggs as if he’d never seen them before. There’s a thing. And there was us thinking they was, er, stones.’
‘Stones,’ said the other one nervously.
‘We crawled under yon chookie for a wee bitty warmth,’ said the first one. ‘And there was all these things, we thought they was stones, which was why the puir fowl was clucking all the time . . .’
‘Clucking,’ said the second one, nodding vigorously.
‘. . . so we took pity on the puir thing and—’ ‘Put. . . the . . . eggs . . .. back,’ said Tiffany, slowly.
The one who hadn’t been doing much talking nudged the other one. ‘Best do as she says,’ it said. ‘It’s a’ gang agley. Ye canna cross an Aching an’ this one’s a hag. She dinged Jenny an’ no one ha’ ever done that afore.’
‘Aye, I didnae think o’ that.’
Both of the tiny men put the eggs back very carefully. One of them even breathed on the shell of his and made a show of polishing it with the ragged hem of his kilt.
‘No harm done, mistress,’ he said. He looked at the other man. And then they vanished. But there was a suspicion of a red blur in the air and some straw by the henhouse door flew up in the air.
‘And I’m a miss!’ shouted Tiffany. She lowered the hen back onto the eggs, and went to the door. ‘And I’m not a hag! Are you fairies of some sort? And what about our ship - I mean, sheep?’ she added.
There was no answer but a clanking of buckets near the house, which meant that other people were getting up.
She rescued the Faerie Tales, blew out the candle and made her way into the house. Her mother was lighting the fire and asked what she was doing up, and she said that she’d heard a commotion in the henhouse and had gone out to see if it was the fox again. That wasn’t a lie. In fact, it was completely true, even if it wasn’t exactly accurate.
Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn’t divide easily into ‘true’ and ‘false’, but instead could be ‘things that people needed to know at the moment’ and ‘things that they didn’t need to know at the moment’..
Besides, she wasn’t sure what she knew at the moment.
There was porridge for breakfast. She ate it hurriedly, meaning to get back out into the paddock and see about that sheep. There might be tracks in the grass, or something . . .
She looked up, not knowing why.
Ratbag had been asleep in front of the oven. Now he was sitting up, alert. Tiffany felt a prickling on the back of her neck, and tried to see what the cat was looking at.
On the dresser was a row of blue and white jars which weren’t very useful for anything. They’d been left to her mother by an elderly aunt, and she was proud of them because they looked nice but were completely useless. There was little room on the farm for useless things that looked nice, so they were treasured.
Ratbag was watching the lid of one of them. It was rising very slowly, and under it was a hint of red hair and two beady, staring eyes.
It lowered again when Tiffany gave it a long stare. A moment later she heard a faint rattle and, when she looked up, the pot was wobbling back and forth and there was a little cloud of dust rising along the top of the dresser. Ratbag was looking around in bewilderment.
They certainly were very fast.
She ran out into the paddock and looked around. The mist was off the grass now, and skylarks were rising on the downs.
‘If that sheep doesn’t come back this minute,’ she shouted at the sky, ‘there will be a reckoning!’
The sound bounced off the hills. And then she heard, very faint but close by, the sound of small voices:
‘Whut did the hag say?’ said the first voice.
‘She said there’d be a reck’ning!’
‘Oh, waily, waily, waily! We’re in trouble noo!’
Tiffany looked around, face red with anger.
‘We have a duty,’ she said, to the air and the grass.
It was something Granny Aching had said once, when Tiffany had been crying about a lamb. She had an old-fashioned way of speaking, and had said: ‘We are as gods to the beasts o’ the field, my jiggit. We order the time o’ their birth and the time o’ their death. Between times, we ha’ a duty.’
‘We have a duty,’ Tiffany repeated, more softly. She glared around the field. ‘I know you can hear me, whoever you are. If that sheep doesn’t come back, there will be . . . trouble . . ..
The larks sang over the sheepfolds, making the silence deeper.
Tiffany had to do the chores before she had any more time to herself. That meant feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs, and feeling slightly proud of the fact that there were two more than there might otherwise have been. It meant fetching six buckets of water from the well and filling the log basket by the stove, but she put those jobs off because she didn’t like doing them much. She did quite like churning butter, though. It gave her time to think.
When I’m a witch with a pointy hat and a broomstick, she thought as she pumped the handle, I’ll wave my hand and the butter will come just like that. And any little red-headed devils that even think about taking our beasts will be—
There was a slopping sound behind her, where she’d lined up the six buckets to take to the well.
One of them was now full of water, which was still sloshing backwards and forwards.
She went back to the churning as if nothing had happened but stopped after a while and went over to the flour bin. She took a small handful of flour and dusted it over the doorstep, and then went back to the churning.
A few minutes later there was another watery sound behind her. When she turned round there was, yes, another full bucket. And in the flour on the stone doorstep were just two lines of little footprints, one leading out of the dairy and one coming back.
It was all Tiffany could do to lift one of the heavy wooden buckets when it was full.
So, she thought, they are immensely strong as well as being incredibly fast. I’m really being very calm about this.
She looked up at the big wooden beams that ran across the room, and a little dust fell down, as if something had quickly moved out of the way.
I think I ought to put a stop to this right now, she thought. On the other hand, there’s no harm in waiting until all the buckets are filled up.
‘And then I’ll have to fill the log box in the scullery,’ she said aloud. Well, it was worth a try.
She went back to the churning, and didn’t bother to turn her head when she heard four more sloshes behind her. Nor did she look round when she heard little whooshwhoosh noises and the clatter of logs in the box. She only turned to see when the noise stopped.
The log box was full up to the ceiling, and all the buckets were full. The patch of flour was a mass of footprints.
She stopped churning. She had a feeling that eyes were watching her, a lot of eyes.
‘Er . . . thank you,’ she said. No, that wasn’t right. She sounded nervous. She let go of the butter paddle and stood up, trying to look as fierce as possible.
‘And what about our sheep?’ she said. I won’t believe you’re really sorry until I see the sheep come back!’
There was a bleating from the paddock. She ran out to the bottom of the garden and looked through the hedge.
The sheep was coming back, backwards and at high speed. It jerked to a halt a little way from the hedge and dropped down as the little men let it go. One of the red-headed men appeared for a moment on its head. He huffed on a horn, polished it with his kilt, and vanished in a blur.
Tiffany walked back to the dairy looking thoughtful.
Oh, and when she got back the butter had been churned. Not just churned, in fact, but patted into a dozen fat golden oblongs on the marble she used when she did it. There was even a sprig of parsley on each one.
Are they brownies? she wondered. According to the Faerie Tales, brownies hung around the house doing chores in exchange for a saucer of milk. But in the picture they’d been cheery little creatures with long pointy hoods. The red-haired men didn’t look as if they’d ever drunk milk in their lives, but perhaps it was worth a try.
‘Well,’ she said aloud, still aware of the hidden watchers. That’ll do. Thank you. I’m glad you’re sorry for what you did.’
She took one of the cat’s saucers from the pile by the sink, washed it carefully, filled it with milk from today’s churn, then put it down on the floor and stood back. ‘Are you brownies?’ she said.
The air blurred. Milk splashed across the floor and the saucer spun round and round.
‘I’ll take that as a no, then,’ said Tiffany. ‘So what are you?’
There were unlimited supplies of no answer at all.
She lay down and looked under the sink, and then peered behind the cheese shelves. She stared up into the dark, spidery shadows of the room. It felt empty.
And she thought: I think I need a whole egg’s worth of education, in a hurry . . ..
Tiffany had walked along the steep track from the farm down into the village hundreds of times. It was less than half a mile long, and over the centuries the carts had worn it down so that it was more like a gully in the chalk and ran like a milky stream in wet weather.
She was halfway down when the susurrus started. The hedges rustled without a wind. The skylarks stopped singing and, while she hadn’t really noticed their song, their silence was a shock. Nothing’s louder than the end of a song that’s always been there.
When she looked up at the sky it was like looking through a diamond. It sparkled, and the air went cold so quickly that it was like stepping into an icy bath.
Then there was snow under foot, snow on the hedges. And the sound of hooves.
They were in the field beside her. A horse was galloping through the snow, behind the hedge that was now, suddenly, just a wall of white.
The hoofbeats stopped. There was a moment of silence and then a horse landed in the lane, skidding on the snow. It pulled itself upright, and the rider turned it to face Tiffany.
The rider himself couldn’t face Tiffany. He had no face. He had no head to hang it on.
She ran. Her boots slipped on the snow as she moved, but suddenly her mind was cold as the ice.
She had two legs, slipping on ice. A horse had twice as many legs to slip. She’d seen horses try to tackle this hill in icy weather. She had a chance.
She heard a breathy, whistling noise behind her, and a whinny from the horse. She risked a glance. The horse was coming after her, but slowly, half walking and half sliding. Steam poured off it.
About halfway down the slope the lane passed under an arch of trees, looking like crashed clouds now under their weight of snow. And beyond them, Tiffany knew, the lane flattened out. The headless man would catch her on the flat. She didn’t know what would happen after that, but she was sure it would be unpleasantly short.
Flakes of snow dropped on her as she passed under the trees, and she decided to make a run for it. She might reach the village. She was good at running.
But if she got there, then what? She’d never reach a door in time. And people would shout, and run about. The dark horseman didn’t look like someone who’d take much notice of that. No, she had to deal with it.
If only she’d brought the frying pan.
‘Here, wee hag! Stannit ye still, right noo!’
She stared up.
A tiny blue man had poked his head up out of the snow on top of the hedge.
‘There’s a headless horseman after me!’ she shouted.
‘He’ll no make it, hinny. Stand ye still! Look him in the eye!’
‘He hasn’t got any eyes!’
‘Crivens! Are ye a hag or no’? Look him in the eyes he hasnae got!’
The blue man disappeared into the snow.
Tiffany turned round. The horseman was trotting under the trees now, the horse more certain as the ground levelled. He had a sword in his hand, and he was looking at her, with the eyes he didn’t have. There was the breathy noise again, not good to hear.
The little men are watching me, she thought. I can’t run. Granny Aching wouldn’t have run from a thing with no head.
She folded her arms and glared.
The horseman stopped, as if puzzled, and then urged the horse forward.
A blue and red shape, larger than the other little men, dropped out of the trees. He landed on the horse’s forehead, between its eyes, and grabbed an ear in both hands.
Tiffany heard the man shout: ‘Here’s a face full o’ dandruff for ye, yer bogle, courtesy of Big Yan!’ and then the man hit the horse between the eyes with his head.
To her amazement the horse staggered sideways.
‘Aw right?’ shouted the tiny fighter. ‘Big toughie, is ye? Once more wi’ feelin’!’
This time the horse danced uneasily the other way, and then its back legs slid from under it and it collapsed in the snow.
Little blue men erupted from the hedge. The horseman, trying to get to his feet, disappeared under a blue and red storm of screaming creatures—
And vanished. The snow vanished. The horse vanished.
The blue men, for a moment, were in a pile on the hot, dusty road. One of them said, ‘Aw, crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!’ And then they, too, vanished, but for a moment Tiffany saw blue and red blurs disappearing into the hedge.
Then the skylarks were back. The hedges were green and full of flowers. Not a twig was broken, not a flower disturbed. The sky was blue, with no flashes of diamond.
Tiffany looked down. On the toes of her boots, snow was melting. She was, strangely, glad about that. It meant that what had just happened was magical, not madness. Because, if she closed her eyes, she could still hear the wheezy breathing of the headless man.
What she needed right now was people, and ordinary things happening. But more than anything else, she wanted answers.
Actually, what she wanted more than anything else was not to hear the wheezy breathing when she shut her eyes . . ..
The tents had gone. Except for a few pieces of broken chalk, apple cores, some stamped-down grass and, alas, a few chicken feathers, there was nothing at all to show that the teachers had ever been there.
A small voice said, 'Psst!’
She looked down. A toad crept out from under a dock leaf.
 ‘Miss Tick said you’d be back,’ it said. ‘I expect there’re some things you need to know, right?’
‘Everything,’ said Tiffany. ‘We’re swamped with tiny men! I can’t understand half of what they say! They keep calling me a hag!’
‘Ah, yes,’ said the toad. ‘You’ve got Nac Mac Feegles!’
‘It snowed, and then it hadn’t! I was chased by a horseman with no head.' And one of the . . . what did you say they were?’
‘Nac Mac Feegles,’ said the toad. ‘Also known as pictsies. They call themselves the Wee Free Men.’
‘Well, one of them head-butted the horse! It fell over! It was a huge horse, too!’
‘Ah, that sounds like a Feegle,’ said the toad.
‘I gave them some milk and they tipped it over!’
‘You gave the Nac Mac Feegles milk!'
‘Well, you said they’re pixies!’
‘Not pixies, pictsies. They certainly don’t drink milk!’
‘Are they from the same place as Jenny?’ Tiffany demanded.
‘No. They’re rebels,’ said the toad.
‘Rebels? Against who?’
‘Everyone. Anything,’ said the toad. ‘Now pick me up.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there’s a woman at the well over there giving you a funny look. Put me in your apron pocket, for goodness’ sake.’
Tiffany snatched up the toad, and smiled at the woman. ‘I’m making a collection of pressed toads,’ she said.
‘That’s nice, dear,’ said the woman, and hurried away.
‘That wasn’t very funny,’ said the toad from her apron.
‘People don’t listen anyway,’ said Tiffany.
She sat down under a tree and took the toad out of her pocket.
‘The Feegles tried to steal some of our eggs and one of our sheep,’ she said. ‘But I got them back.’
‘You  got  something back  from  the  Nac  Mac Feegle?’ said the toad. ‘Were they ill?’
‘No. They were a bit. . .. well, sweet, actually. They even did the chores for me.’
‘The Feegle did chores!’ said the toad. They never do chores! They’re not helpful at all!’
‘And then there was the headless horseman!’ said Tiffany. ‘He had no head!’
‘Well, that is the major job qualification,’ said the toad.
‘What’s going on, toad?’ said Tiffany. ‘Is it the Feegles who are invading?’
The toad looked a bit shifty. ‘Miss Tick doesn’t really want you to handle this,’ it said. ‘She’ll be back soon with help . . .'
‘Is she going to be in time?’ Tiffany demanded.
‘I don’t know. Probably. But you shouldn’t—’
‘I want to know what is happening!’
‘She’s gone to get some other witches,’ said the toad. ‘Uh . . . she doesn’t think you should—’
 ‘You’d better tell me what you know, toad,’ said Tiffany. ‘Miss Tick isn’t here. I am.’
‘Another world is colliding with this one,’ said the toad. There. Happy now? That’s what Miss Tick thinks. But it’s happening faster than she expected. All the monsters are coming back.’
‘Why?’
‘There’s no one to stop them.’
There was silence for a moment.
‘There’s me,’ said Tiffany.