“I could! I could!” I cried out. “And inside the Castle I could go snooping around simply everywhere!”
“But your main job, of course,” my grandmother said, “would be to destroy every witch in the place. That really would be the end of the whole organisation!”
“Me destroy them?” I cried. “How could I do that?”
“Can’t you guess?” she said.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Mouse-Maker!” my grandmother shouted. “Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker all over again! You will feed it to everyone in the Castle by putting drops of it into their food! You do remember the recipe, don’t you?”
“Every bit of it!” I answered. “You mean we’re going to make it ourselves?”
“Why not?” she cried. “If they can make it, so can we! It’s just a question of knowing what goes into it!”
“Who’s going to climb up the tall trees to get the gruntles’ eggs?” I asked her.
“I will!” she cried. “I’ll do it myself! There’s plenty of life in this old dog yet!”
“I think I’d better do that part of it, Grandmamma. You might come a cropper.”
“Those are just details!” she cried, waving her stick again. “We shall let nothing stand in our way!”
“And what happens after that?” I asked her. “After the new Grand High Witch and everyone else in the Castle have been turned into mice?”
“Then the Castle will be completely empty and I shall come in and join you and…”
“Wait!” I cried. “Hold on, Grandmamma! I’ve just had a nasty thought!”
“What nasty thought?” she said.
“When the Mouse-Maker turned me into a mouse,” I said, “I didn’t become just any old ordinary mouse that you catch with mouse-traps. I became a talking thinking intelligent mouse-person who wouldn’t go near a mouse-trap!”
My grandmother stopped dead in her tracks. She already knew what was coming next.
“Therefore,” I went on, “if we use the Mouse-Maker to turn the new Grand High Witch and all the other witches in the Castle into mice, the whole place will be swarming with very clever, very nasty, very dangerous talking thinking mouse-witches! They’ll all be witches in mouse’s clothing. And that”, I added, “could be very horrible indeed.”
“By golly, you’re right!” she cried. “That never occurred to me!”
“I couldn’t possibly take on a castleful of mouse-witches,” I said.
“Nor could I,” she said. “They’d have to be got rid of at once. They’d have to be smashed and bashed and chopped up into little pieces exactly as they were in the Hotel Magnificent.”
“I’m not doing that,” I said. “I couldn’t anyway. I don’t think you could either, Grandmamma. And mouse-traps wouldn’t be the slightest use. By the way,” I added, “The Grand High Witch who did me in was wrong about mouse-traps wasn’t she?”
“Yes, yes,” my grandmother said impatiently. “But I’m not concerned with that Grand High Witch. She’s been chopped up long ago by the hotel chef. It’s the new Grand High Witch we’ve got to deal with now, the one up in the Castle, and all her assistants. A Grand High Witch is bad enough when she’s disguised as a lady, but just think of what she could do if she were a mouse! She could go anywhere!”
“I’ve got it!” I shouted, leaping about a foot in the air. “I’ve got the answer!”
“Tell me!” my grandmother snapped.
“The answer is CATS!” I shouted. “Bring on the cats!”
My grandmother stared at me. Then a great grin spread over her face and she shouted, “It’s brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!”
“Shove half-a-dozen cats into that Castle,” I cried, “and they’ll kill every mouse in the place in five minutes, I don’t care how clever they are!”
“You’re a magician!” my grandmother shouted, starting to wave her stick about once again.
“Look out for the vases, Grandmamma!”
“To heck with the vases!” she shouted. “I’m so thrilled I don’t care if I break the lot!”
“Just one thing,” I said. “You’ve got to make absolutely sure I’m well out of the way myself before you put the cats in.”
“That’s a promise,” she said.
“What will we do after the cats have killed all the mice?” I asked her.