Which Witch? Read online

  Which Witch?

  Eva Ibbotson writes for both adults and children. Born in Vienna, she now lives in the north of England. She has a daughter and three sons, now grown up, who showed her that children like to read about ghosts, wizards and witches ‘because they are just like people but madder and more interesting’. She has written many other ghostly adventures for children. Which Witch? was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal and The Secret of Platform 13 was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. She won the Smarties prize, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year, with the novel Journey to the River Sea.

  For more information about Eva Ibbotson and her books visit: www.bebo.com/evaibbotson and www.panmacmillan.com/evaibbotson

  Also by Eva Ibbotson

  The Great Ghost Rescue The Haunting of Hiram

  Not Just a Witch

  The Secret of Platform 13

  Dial A Ghost

  Monster Mission

  Journey to the River Sea

  The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

  The Star of Kazan

  For older readers

  The Secret Countess

  A Song for Summer

  The Morning Gift

  Coming soon

  The Dragonfly Pool

  A Company of Swans

  Which

  Witch?

  Eva Ibbotson

  MACMILLAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  First published 1979 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This edition published 2001 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published 2008 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-47776-5 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-330-47775-8 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-330-47777-2 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Eva Ibbotson 1979

  The right of Eva Ibbotson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  for Alan

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  One

  As soon as he was born, Mr and Mrs Canker knew that their baby was not like other people’s children.

  For one thing he was born with a full set of teeth and would lie in his pram for hours, chewing huge mutton bones to shreds or snapping at the noses of old ladies fool enough to kiss him. For another, though he screamed with temper when they changed his nappies, his eyes never actually filled with tears. Also – and perhaps this was the strangest of all – as soon as they brought him home from hospital and lit a nice, bright fire in the sitting room, the smoke from their chimney began to blow against the wind.

  For a while the Cankers were puzzled. But as Mr Canker said, there is a book about everything if you only know where to look, and one day he went to Todcaster Public Library and began to read. He read and he read and he read, and what he read most about was Black Magic and Sorcery and how to tell from a very early age whether someone is going to be a wizard or a witch. After which he went home and broke the news to Mrs Canker.

  It was a shock, of course. No one likes to think that their baby is going to grow up to be a wizard, and a black one at that. But the Cankers were sensible people. They changed the baby’s name from George to Arriman (after a famous and very wicked Persian sorcerer), painted a frieze of vampire bats and newts’ tongues on his nursery wall and decided that if he had to grow up to be a wizard they would see to it he was a good one.

  It wasn’t easy. Todcaster, where they lived, was an ordinary town full of ordinary people. Though they encouraged little Arriman to practise as much as possible, it was embarrassing to have their bird-table full of gloomy and lop-sided vultures and to have to explain to their neighbours why their apple tree had turned overnight into a blackened stump shaped like a dead man’s hand.

  Fortunately, wizards grow up quickly. By the time he was fifteen, Arriman could take a bus to Todcaster Common and raise a whirlwind that had every pair of knickers on every washing line in the area flying halfway to Jericho, and soon afterwards he decided to leave home and set up on his own.

  The search for a new house took many months. Arriman didn’t want a place that was sunny and cheerful or a place that was near a town, and though he wanted somewhere ruined and desolate, he was fussy about the kind of ghost it had. Never having had a sister, Arriman was a little shy with women and he didn’t fancy the idea of a Wailing Grey Lady walking back and forth across his breakfast table while he ate his kippers, or a Headless Nun catching him in his bath.

  But at last he found Darkington Hall. It was a grey, gloomy, sprawling building about thirty miles from Todcaster. To the west of the Hall was a sinister forest, to the north were bleak and windswept moors and to the east, the grey, relentlessly-pounding sea. What’s more, the Darkington ghost was a gentleman, and the sort that Arriman thought he could well get on with: Sir Simon Montpelier who, in the sixteenth century, had murdered all seven of his wives and now wandered about groaning with guilt, moaning with misery and striking his forehead with a plashing sound.

  And here Arriman lived for many years, blighting and smiting, blasting and wuthering and doing everything he could to keep darkness and sorcery alive in the land. He filled his battlements with screech owls and his cellars with salamanders. He lined the avenue with scorched tree stumps like gallows and he dug a well in his courtyard from which brimstone and sulphur oozed horribly. H e planted a yew tree maze so complicated and devilish that no one had a hope of coming out alive, and he made the fountains on the terrace run with blood. There was only one thing he couldn’t do. He couldn’t raise the ghost of Sir Simon Montpelier. He would have liked to do this; Sir Simon would have been company. But bringing ghosts back to life is the blackest and most difficult magic of all and even Arriman couldn’t manage it.

  The years passed. Though he seldom left the Hall, Arriman’s fame was spreading. People called him Arriman the Awful, Loather of Light and Wizard of the North. Stories began to be told about him: how he could make the thunder come before the lightning, that he was friends with Beelzebub himself. But Arriman just went on working. He had grown to be a tall and handsome man with dark, flashing eyes, a curved nose like the prow of a Viking ship and a flourishing moustache, but despite his fine
looks, he was not at all conceited.

  In the years that followed, Arriman set up a private zoo in which he kept all the nastiest and ugliest animals he could find: monkeys with bald faces and blue behinds, camels with sneering lips and lumpy knees, wallabies with feet like railway sleepers which kicked everything in sight. He turned the Billiard Room into a laboratory in which fiendish things bubbled all day long giving off appalling smells, and he called in rain clouds from the sea to drip relentlessly on to his roof.

  Then one day he woke feeling completely miserable. He knew he ought to get up and throw someone into his well or order a stinking emu for the zoo or mix something poisonous in his laboratory, but he just couldn’t face it.

  ‘Lester,’ he said, to the servant who brought him his breakfast. ‘I feel tired. Weary. Bored.’

  Lester was an ogre; a huge, slow-moving man with muscles like footballs. Like most ogres, he had only one eye in the middle of his forehead, but so as not to upset people he wore a black eyepatch above it to make people think he had two. Before he came to be Arriman’s servant, Lester had been a sword swallower in a fair and he still liked to gulp down the odd sabre or fencing foil. It soothed him.

  Now he looked anxiously at his master. ‘Do you, sir?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I do. In fact I don’t know if I can go on much longer. I thought I might go away somewhere, Lester. Take a little room in some pretty market town perhaps and write a book.’

  The ogre was shocked. ‘But what would happen to Blackness and Evil, sir?’

  Arriman frowned. ‘I know, I know. I have a duty, I see that. But how long am I supposed to go on like this? How long, Lester?’ The frown deepened and he waved his arms in desperation. ‘How long?’

  Lester wasn’t the stupid kind of ogre who goes round saying ‘Fe Fi Fo Fum’ all the time. So now he looked at his master and said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t know, sir. Ogres can’t tell the future, you know. Gypsies can, though. Why don’t you go and have your fortune told? There was a gypsy where I worked. Esmeralda, they called her. Knew her stuff, she did.’

  So the following week, Arriman and Lester drove into Todcaster to find the fair.

  They found Esmeralda’s caravan quite easily. You could tell it from the other gypsy caravans because the people who came out of it looked as though they didn’t know what had hit them.

  ‘She tells the truth,’ explained Lester, sniffing happily at the remembered fairground smells: fried onions from the hamburger stall, hot engine oil from the dodgems . . . ‘None of that garbage about dark strangers and journeys across the sea.’

  Esmeralda was a frizzy-haired lady in a pink satin blouse. Arriman had left off his magician’s cloak and changed into a grey pin-stripe, but the look she gave him was very sharp indeed.

  ‘For you it’ll be a fiver,’ she said. ‘Sit down.’

  She pocketed the money, took a swig from a bottle labelled Gordon’s Gin and began to stare into her crystal ball.

  She stared for a long time. Then she pushed the ball away and lit a fag. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘He’s coming.’

  ‘Who?’ said Arriman eagerly. ‘ Who’s coming?’

  ‘The new bloke,’ said Esmeralda. ‘The one that’s going to take over from you.’

  Arriman looked bewildered. ‘What new bloke?’

  Esmeralda closed her eyes wearily. ‘Do you want me to spell it out for you?’ She put on a posh voice and droned, ‘Soon there cometh a great new wizard whose power shall be mightier and darker even than your own. When this Great New Wizard cometh, you, Arriman the Awful, will be able to lay down the burden of Darkness and Evil which you have carried for so long.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Got it?’ she said nastily .

  ‘Oh, yes, yes!’ said Arriman happily. ‘ I suppose you don’t know when he cometh?’

  ‘No,’ snapped Esmeralda, ‘I don’t. Next customer please.’

  After his visit to Esmeralda, Arriman was a happy man. Just to fill in time he planted a briar hedge whose thorns oozed blood, ran an oil tanker aground on the cliffs nearby and invented a new spell for making people’s hair fall out. But most of the time he spent by the main gate, watching and waiting for the new wizard to come.

  It was cold work. Darkington Hall was as far north as you could get without bumping into Scotland and when after a week, Arriman found a chilblain on his left toe, he very sensibly decided to make a Wizard Watcher.

  For the Wizard Watcher’s body he used a sea lion shape but larger and furrier with a sloping and rather cuddly chest. The Watcher had four feet and one tail, but it had three heads with keen-sighted and beautiful eyes set on short stalks. And every day at sunrise this gentle and very useful monster would waddle down the avenue, past the blackened trees shaped like gallows, past the oozing well and the devilish maze, and sit in the gateway watching for the wizard.

  It watched in this way day after day, month after month, year after year, the Middle Head looking north over the moors, the Left-Hand Head looking west across the forest and the Right-Hand Head looking east towards the sea. Then, on the nine hundred and nintieth day of just sitting there, the Wizard Watcher lost heart and became gloomy and annoyed.

  ‘He cometh not from the north,’ said the Middle Head, as it had done every day for nine hundred and eighty-nine days.

  ‘He cometh not from the west neither,’ said the Left-Hand Head.

  ‘Nor from the east doesn’t he cometh,’ said the Right-Hand Head. ‘And our feet are freezing.’

  ‘Our feet are blinking dropping off,’ said the Left-Hand Head.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Know what I think?’ said the Middle Head. ‘I think the old man’s been had.’

  ‘You mean there ain’t going to be no new wizard?’ said the Left-Hand Head.

  The Middle Head nodded.

  This time the pause was a long one.

  ‘Don’t fancy telling him,’ said the Right-Hand Head at last.

  ‘Someone’s got to,’ said the Middle Head.

  So the monster turned and lumbered back to the Hall where it found Arriman in his bedroom dressing for dinner.

  ‘Well?’ he said eagerly. ‘ What’s the news?’

  ‘The new wizard cometh not from the north,’ began the Middle Head patiently.

  ‘Nor from the west he doesn’t cometh,’ said the Left-Hand Head.

  ‘And you can forget the east,’ said the Right-Hand Head, ‘because the new wizard doesn’t cometh from there neither.’

  Then, speaking all together, the three heads said bravely, ‘ We think you have been taken for a ride.’

  Arriman stared at them, aghast. ‘You can’t mean it! It isn’t possible!’ He turned to Lester who was getting ready to trim his master’s moustache. ‘What do you think?’

  The ogre rubbed his forehead under the eyepatch and looked worried. ‘I’ve never known Esmeralda make a mistake, sir. But it’s been a long— ’

  He was interrupted by a terrible shriek from Arriman who was peering forward into the mirror and clutching his head.

  ‘A white hair!’ yelled the magician. ‘A white hair in my curse curl! Oh Shades of Darkness and Perdition, this is the END!’

  His shriek brought Mr Leadbetter, his secretary, hurrying into the room. Mr Leadbetter had been born with a small tail which had made him think he was a demon. This was a silly thing to think because quite a lot of people have small tails. The Duke of Wellington had one and had to have a special hole made in his saddle when he rode to battle at Waterloo. But Mr Leadbetter hadn’t known about the Duke of Wellington and had wasted a lot of time trying to rob banks and so on, until he realized that crime didn’t suit him and he became Arriman’s secretary instead.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ he asked anxiously. ‘ You seem upset.’

  ‘Upset? I’m finished! Devastated. Don’t you know what a white hair means? It means old age, it means death. It means the end of Wizardry and Darkness and Doom at Darkington. And where is the new wizard, where, where where?’<
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  The monster sighed. ‘He cometh not from the north,’ began the Middle Head wearily.

  ‘I know he cometh not from the north, you dolt,’ snapped the Great Man. ‘That’s exactly what I’m complaining about. What am I going to do? I can’t wait for ever.’

  Mr Leadbetter coughed. ‘Have you ever, sir, considered marriage?’

  There was a sudden flash of fire from Arriman’s nostrils, and from behind the panelling, Sir Simon gave a gurgling groan.

  ‘Marriage! Me, marry! Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘If you were to marry, sir, it would ensure the succession,’ said Mr Leadbetter calmly.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ snapped Arriman, who was feeling thoroughly miserable and therefore cross.

  ‘He means you could have a wizard baby, sir. Then it could take over from you. A son, you know,’ said Lester.

  Arriman was silent. A son. For a moment he imagined the baby sitting in his pram, a dear little fellow tearing a marrow bone to shreds. Then he flinched.

  ‘Who would I marry?’ he muttered miserably.

  But of course he knew. All of them knew. There is only one kind of person a wizard can marry and that is a witch.

  ‘It wouldn’t be so bad, maybe?’ said the Left-Hand Head encouragingly.

  ‘Wouldn’t be so bad!’ yelled Arriman. ‘Are you out of your mind? A great black crone with warts and blisters in unmentionable places from crashing about on her broom! You want me to sit opposite one of those every morning eating my cornflakes?’

  ‘I believe witches have changed since—’ began Mr Leadbetter.

  But Arriman wouldn’t listen. ‘Running along the corridors in her horrible nightgown, shrieking and flapping. Getting egg on her whiskers. Expecting her pussy cat to sleep on the bed, no doubt!’

  ‘She might not—’

  ‘Every time I went to the kitchen for a snack she’d be there, stirring things in her filthy pot – rubbishy frogs’ tongues and newts’ eyes and all that balderdash. Never a decent bit of steak in the place, I expect, once she came.’