There now appeared in front of me row upon row of bald female heads, a sea of naked scalps, every one of them red and itchy-looking from being rubbed by the linings of the wigs. I simply cannot tell you how awful they were, and somehow the whole sight was made more grotesque because underneath those frightful scabby bald heads, the bodies were dressed in fashionable and rather pretty clothes. It was monstrous. It was unnatural.
Oh heavens, I thought. Oh help! Oh Lord have mercy on me! These foul bald-headed females are child-killers every one of them, and here I am imprisoned in the same room and I can’t escape!
At that point, a new and doubly horrifying thought struck me. My grandmother had said that with their special nose-holes they could smell out a child on a pitch-black night from right across the other side of the road. Up to now, my grandmother had been right every time. It seemed a certainty therefore that one of the witches in the back row was going to sniff me out at any moment and then the yell of “Dogs’ droppings!” would go up all over the room and I would be cornered like a rat.
I knelt on the carpet behind the screen, hardly daring to breathe.
Then suddenly I remembered another very important thing my grandmother had told me. “The dirtier you are,” she had said, “the harder it is for a witch to smell you out.”
How long since I had last had a bath?
Not for ages. I had my own room in the hotel and my grandmother never bothered with silly things like that. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’d had a bath since we arrived.
When had I last washed my hands or face?
Certainly not this morning.
Not yesterday either.
I glanced down at my hands. They were covered with smudge and mud and goodness knows what else besides.
So perhaps I had a chance after all. The stink-waves couldn’t possibly get out through all that dirt.
“Vitches of Inkland!” shouted The Grand High Witch. She herself I noticed had not taken off either her wig or her gloves or her shoes. “Vitches of Inkland!” she yelled.
The audience stirred uneasily and sat up straighter in their chairs.
“Miserrrable vitches!” she yelled. “Useless lazy vitches! Feeble frrribbling vitches! You are a heap of idle good-for-nothing vurms!”
A shudder went through the audience. The Grand High Witch was clearly in an ugly mood and they knew it. I had a feeling that something awful was going to happen soon.
“I am having my breakfast this morning,” cried The Grand High Witch, “and I am looking out of the vindow at the beach, and vot am I seeing? I am asking you, vot am I seeing? I am seeing a rrreevolting sight! I am seeing hundreds, I am seeing thousands of rrrotten rrree-pulsive little children playing on the sand! It is putting me rrright off my food! Vye have you not got rrrid of them?” she screamed. “Vye have you not rrrubbed them all out; these filthy smelly children?”
With each word she spoke, flecks of pale-blue phlegm shot from her mouth like little bullets.
“I am asking you vye!” she screamed.
Nobody answered her question.
“Children smell!” she screamed. “They stink out the vurld! Vee do not vont these children around here!”
The bald heads in the audience all nodded vigorously.
“Vun child a veek is no good to me!” The Grand High Witch cried out. “Is that the best you can do?”
“We will do better,” murmured the audience. “We will do much better.”
“Better is no good either!” shrieked The Grand High Witch. “I demand maximum rrree-sults! So here are my orders! My orders are that every single child in this country shall be rrrubbed out, sqvashed, sqvirted, sqvittered and frrrittered before I come here again in vun year’s time! Do I make myself clear?”
A great gasp went up from the audience. I saw the witches all looking at one another with deeply troubled expressions. And I heard one witch at the end of the front row saying aloud, “All of them! We can’t possibly wipe out all of them!”