Marcia and Alice pushed their way through the stamping, clapping and highly excited crowd. Marcia was unused to people not making way for her at once. “Excuse me, excuse me,” she repeated irritably, over and over again.
“Oi! Just because you’re dressed like old Bossy Boots doesn’t mean you have to behave like her too,” a giant Bogle Bug remonstrated as Marcia tried to elbow it out of the way. Marcia then found her path to the witches deliberately blocked by the Bogle Bug’s friends—a giant Water Nixie, a luminous Specter and two pink Magogs.
“Stop pushing, will you?” one of the pink Magogs told Marcia. “We can’t all be at the front!”
Marcia resisted the urge to send a self-propelled Sting Bug into the Magog’s costume and doggedly carried on through the throng. She and Alice were heading for a space at the front of the crowd, where an open metal box lay on the edge of the Quay. Around the box—in which a sea of worms wriggled and writhed—were Linda, the Witch Mother, Veronica and Daphne, who had her fists tightly clamped over her eyes.
It was Linda who was running the show—she had the crowd in the palm of her hand and was chanting an Incantation in time to the stamping feet. At the end of each phrase she turned to the crowd and yelled, “Yeah!” which the crowd repeated with gusto. Linda’s eyes shone with exhilaration; with every “Yeah!” the crowd added their energy to the spell. This is going to be massive, Linda thought.
“Let them fly way up high! Yeah!” Linda screamed.
“Yeah!” the crowd yelled in return.
“Let them grow when they go! Yeah!”
“Yeah!”
“Let what we see no longer be! Yeah!”
“Yeah!”
“Let them be part of the sea! Yeah!”
“Yeah!”
“Let them be … gribble!”
There was a sudden, shocked silence.
“Gribble?” a mummy in front of Marcia muttered to its fellow mummy. “But isn’t that one of those worms?”
“Yeah. Er, I mean yes. Ship-eating worms.”
The first mummy laughed. “Hey, Bill, we’re acting like it’s real.”
Bill-the-Mummy laughed uneasily. “Felt like it,” he said.
Linda had forgotten she was in the middle of a crowd of people who were closely connected with all things maritime. Almost every person on that Quay knew what gribble worms were—little marine worms that ate their way through ships’ timbers in no time at all. A ship could set off from Port with a few gribbles buried in its timbers and a couple of weeks later disappear into the ocean, leaving nothing more than a froth of wood dust on the surface of the water.
But Linda was no fool; she sensed that the crowd was turning against her. The Incantation needed time to brew—there were thousands of worms to turn—and Linda knew she had to get the crowd back on her side for at least another two minutes.
“But hey, guys, we don’t want to do that—do we?” she yelled.
“No!” a few uncertain shouts came in reply.
“We want to have fun!” Linda shouted, frantically jumping up and down and grinning so hard that she thought her face might crack. “Hey! And that’s what we are going to do. Fun! Yeah?”
It worked.
“Yeah!” yelled the crowd.
This was too much for Daphne. She turned to the crowd and screamed out, “But it’s not fun. It’s not. I hate you, Linda. I hate you all!”
Linda—once a supremely accomplished playground bully—recognized an opportunity. “Ooh,” she said. “She hates us. Ooh.”
“Ooh,” those in the crowd who had not been bullied echoed obligingly.
“Perhaps I should turn her into a gribble?”
“Yeah!” someone yelled from the back. “Gribble!”
Linda reckoned she was getting the crowd back on her side. “She’d like that,” she said. “She’d like it in there, wriggling around with her slimy little friends.” Linda pointed to the box at her feet, which was now, to her relief, glowing a bright orange and hissing. She grabbed Daphne by the collar and asked the audience, “So, what do you say—shall I turn this moaning little worm into a gribble?”
The audience sensed some fun was on the way. “Yeah!” more people shouted. “Yeah! Turn her into a gribble!” A chant began to build. “Grib-ull, grib-ull, grib-ull!”
Daphne looked horrified. She wrenched herself away from Linda and ran. The crowd parted to make way for her exit and Daphne cannoned straight into Marcia. There was a roar of laughter.
“Brilliant timing!” said someone. “Absolutely brilliant.”
Marcia winced as Daphne’s sticky witch cloak brushed against the Magyk in her own cloak.
“These witches are very realistic,” Alice shouted to Marcia over the noise.
“They’re more than realistic, Alice,” Marcia shouted back. “They’re real.”
“Real?” Alice yelled. “Really real?”
“There’s a witchy Darkenesse in the air you could cut with a knife,” said Marcia.
“But Marcia, if they’re real, then what they are doing is real too,” Alice said.
“I would imagine so,” Marcia said drily. With Alice at her heels, Marcia moved rapidly through the cleared space and headed toward Linda, who was now working her audience into a frenzy.
“What do we want?” Linda was shouting.
“Grib-ull, grib-ull!” everyone yelled.
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
To the delight of the crowd Marcia, backed up by Alice, was now face-to-face with Linda. “Hey, Wizard and witch fight!” someone yelled.
The call was quickly taken up: “Wizard and witch! Fight! Fight! Fight! Wizard and witch! Fight! Fight! Fight!”
“Quiet!” Linda yelled—and such was her crowd control that she got it at once. “Gribble first—then fight! Yeah?”
“Yeah!” yelled the crowd. “Gribble first! Then fight!”
Eyeing the suspiciously glowing box of woodworms, Marcia waited until the noise had died away enough for her to be heard. Then she took a deep breath and yelled, “Port Witch Coven! I command you to stop. Now!”
“Spoilsport!” came a shout from the crowd, and it was quickly taken up into a chant. “Spo-il-sport! Spo-il-sport! Spo-il-sport!”
Linda laughed and Marcia felt horribly uncomfortable. She had forgotten how much she had come to rely on the respect people automatically gave her as ExtraOrdinary Wizard. Suddenly she was just another Hallowseeth reveler in a dodgy costume—and it was a shock.
Eager to see what was happening, people began to push past Marcia and Alice, who were quickly edged out of the space around the witches. Marcia lost patience. With the help of a few well-judged Pushes, she emerged into the clearing. In front of her sat the box—from which emanated a powerful, crowd-fueled Magyk—now alive with writhing woodworms glowing brilliant red. Linda and the Witch Mother were staring into the contents, willing them to do something fast.
Veronica saw Marcia coming. “Pigs!” she said. “It’s the pigging ExtraOrdinary Wizard!”
“It’s only some idiot in a purple nightie, stupid,” snapped Linda.
But the Witch Mother knew Marcia from way back. “No, it’s not,” she snapped. “Quick, Linda. Do it!”
Linda became flustered. “It’s done, you stupid old trout,” she hissed. “We just have to wait for it to—”
Marcia was upon them.
“Pig off!” yelled Linda.
Marcia hurled a Freeze Flash at them.
It was too late. Its energy was diverted into the witches’ Magyk and it triggered the spell. There was a deafening boom that resonated all around the harborside. The crowd screamed in excitement, Daphne’s box erupted in a blaze of light and a stream of brilliant red stars whooshed into the sky. All eyes followed them as they rose up and up, and then with a faint pfut broke into myriad pinpoints of light that rained gently down and settled daintily onto the ships. A roar of appreciation came from the crowd, followed by riotous applause.
“Jolly good,” Linda said to the Witch Mother. “The rats will be jumping ship soon. Now, girls, lose yourselves in the crowd before anyone realizes what’s going on. Remember, I want a kid small enough to fit up the sewer pipe. It so needs unblocking. Ha ha.”
“Stop right there!” said Marcia.
“Oh stuff off,” Linda snarled, and pushed past Marcia. Marcia swung around and threw a long, low Trip-Up that went curling around Linda’s feet, sending the witch sprawling onto the wet cobblestones. Linda burst out laughing. “Too late!” she yelled. “Too pigging late!”
A shriek from Alice Nettles took Marcia’s attention away from the witches.
“Oh my goodness,” gasped Marcia. The ships were melting.