Groosham Grange (12 page)

He looked back the way he had come. The tunnel seemed to end with a sheet of steel. That was what the mirror looked like from the other side. Then Jill stepped through it as if it were a sheet of water and stopped, her hands on her hips.

“You see,” she said. “I told you you could do it.”

“But how did you know about it?” David asked.

“I know a lot more…”

She brushed past him and continued down the tunnel. David followed, wondering if he was still asleep after all. But everything felt too real. He shivered in the breeze, tasted the salt water on his lips, felt the weight of the rocks hemming him in. The passage dipped down and his ears popped as the pressure increased.

“Where does this lead to?” he asked.

“You’ll see.”

When it seemed that they had walked half a mile, David became aware of a strange, silver glow. There had been no light bulbs or torches to light the way and he realized now that the tunnel had been filled with the same silvery glow as if it were a mist rising from a subterranean lake. Jill stopped, waiting for him to catch up. He hurried forward, out of the tunnel and into…

It was a huge cavern, the cavern of his dream. Stalactites and stalagmites hung down, soared up, as if carved from the dreams of Nature itself. One entire wall was covered by a petrified waterfall, brilliant white, a frozen eternity. In the middle of it all stood the sacrificial block, solid granite, horribly final. Mr Kilgraw was standing behind it. He had been waiting for them. Jill had led him to them.

David spun round, searching for something he knew he would find, something he should have seen from the start. And there it was, on her third finger. A black ring.

“Jill…!” He shook his head, unable to speak. “When were you thirteen?” he demanded at last.

“Yesterday,” Jill said. She looked at him reproachfully. “You never wished me a happy birthday. But I don’t mind, David.” She smiled. “You see, we were wrong. We were fighting them. But all the time they were really on our side.”

The despair was like quicksand, sucking him in. There was no more fight in him. He had failed – failed to escape, failed to do anything. Jill had been taken. She was one of them. At last he was finally alone.

And now it was his turn.

They had come for him.

As one, the pupils of Groosham Grange moved out of the shadows at the edge of the cavern, forming a circle around him. The rest of the staff appeared behind Mr Kilgraw. David walked slowly to the granite block. He didn’t want to walk there. But his legs would no longer obey his commands.

He stopped in front of Mr Kilgraw. The other pupils had closed the circle, locking him in. Everyone was looking at him.

“You have fought us long and hard, David,” Mr Kilgraw said. “I congratulate you on your courage. But the time for fighting is over. Today is your thirteenth birthday. Midnight is approaching. You must make your choice.

“Listen to me, David. You are the seventh son of a seventh son. That is why you were brought to Groosham Grange. You have powers. We want to teach you how to use them.”

“I’m not a witch!” David cried. The words echoed around the cavern. “I never will be!”

“Why not?” Mr Kilgraw had not raised his voice but he was speaking with an intensity and a passion that David had never heard before. “Why not, David? Why do you refuse to see things our way? You think ghosts and witches and vampires and ghosts and two-headed monsters are bad. Why? Do you know what that is, David? It’s prejudice. Racial prejudice!”

Mr Fitch and Mr Teagle nodded appreciatively. Mrs Windergast muttered a brief “Hear! Hear!”

“There’s nothing bad about us. Have we hurt you? True, we had to see to Mr Netherby, but that was no fault of ours. You brought him here. We were only protecting ourselves.

“The trouble is, you’ve seen too many horror films. We vampires have never had a fair deal on the screen. And look at werewolves! Just because my good friend Monsieur Leloup likes the occasional pigeon salad when there’s a full moon, everyone thinks they’ve a right to hunt him down and shoot silver bullets in him. And what about Mr Creer? All right, so he’s dead. But he’s still a very good teacher – in fact, he’s a lot more lively than quite a few living teachers I could mention.”

“But I’m not like you,” David insisted. “I don’t want to be like you.”

“You have power,” Mr Kilgraw replied. “That is all that matters. And the real question you should be asking yourself, David, is, do you really want to stay with your parents and follow your singularly unpleasant father into merchant banking? Or do you want to be free?

“Join us, and you’ll be rich. We can teach you how to make gold out of lead, how to destroy your enemies just by snapping your fingers. We can show you how to see into the future and use it for yourself. Think of it, David! You can have everything you want … and more. Look at Miss Pedicure! She’s lived for ever. So can you…

“All right, I admit it. We are, frankly, evil. My friends Mr Fitch and Mr Teagle are more evil than any of us. They’ve won awards for being evil. But what’s so bad about being evil?
We’ve
never dropped an atom bomb on anyone.
We’ve
never polluted the environment or experimented on animals or cut back on National Health spending. Our evil is rather agreeable. Why do you think there have been so many books and films about us? It’s because people like us. We are actually rather pleasantly evil.”

While Mr Kilgraw had spoken, the sixty-four pupils of Groosham Grange, novice witches and young adepts all, had tightened the circle. Now they were moving closer to David, their eyes bearing down on him. Jill was next to Jeffrey. William Rufus was on the other side. Sixty-four black rings glowed in the underground light.

Mr Kilgraw held the sixty-fifth.

“I have enjoyed the fight, David,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be easy. I admire courage. But now it is midnight.” He reached out with his other hand. Gregor scurried forward and gave him his knife.

“Here is your choice,” he went on. “The ring or the knife? You can reject us one final time. In that instance, I regret that I will be forced to plunge the blade into your heart. I can assure you that it will hurt me more than it will hurt you. And we’ll give you a decent burial in the school cemetery.

“Alternatively, you can accept us, take a new name and begin your education in earnest. But there can be no going back, David. If you join us, you join us for ever.”

David felt himself being forced down on to the granite block. The circle of faces spun round him. There was the ring. And there was the knife.

“Now, David,” Mr Kilgraw asked. “What do you say?”

“When I was a boy,” Mr Eliot said, “I had to work in my holidays. My father made me work so hard I’d have to spend three weeks in hospital before I could go back to school.”

“But David’s only got one day’s holiday,” Mrs Eliot reminded him, pouring herself a glass of gin.

“I am aware of that, my dear.” Mr Eliot snatched the glass out of her hand and drank it himself. “And if you ask me, one day is much too long. If I’d been expelled from Beton College my father would never have spoken to me again. In fact he’d have cut off my ears so I wouldn’t hear him if he spoke to me accidentally.”

The two parents were sitting in the living-room of their house in Wiernotta Mews. Edward Eliot was smoking a cigar. Eileen Eliot was stroking Beefeater, her favourite Siamese cat. They had just eaten lunch – ham salad served in true vegetarian style, without the ham.

“Maybe we should take him to a film or something?” Mrs Eliot suggested nervously.

“A film?”

“Well … or a concert…”

“Are you mad?” Mr Eliot snapped. He leant forward angrily and stubbed his cigar out on the cat. The cat screeched and leapt off Mrs Eliot, its back claws ripping off most of her stockings and part of her leg. “Why should we take him anywhere?” Mr Eliot demanded.

“Perhaps you are right, my love,” Mrs Eliot whimpered, pouring the rest of the gin on to her leg to stop the bleeding.

Just then the door opened and David walked in.

He had changed since his departure for Groosham Grange. He was thinner, older, somehow wiser. He had always been quiet. But now there was something strange about his silence. It was like a wall between him and his parents. And when he looked at them, it was with soft, almost merciless, eyes.

Mr Eliot glanced at his watch. “Well, David,” he said. “You’ve got seven hours and twenty-two minutes before your holiday’s over. So why don’t you go and mow the lawn?”

“But it’s a plastic lawn!” Mrs Eliot protested.

“Then he can go and wash it!”

“Of course, dear!” Mrs Eliot beamed at her husband, then fainted from loss of blood.

David sighed. Seven hours and twenty-two minutes. He hadn’t realized there was still so much time.

He lifted his right hand.

“What’s that you’re wearing?” his father demanded.

David muttered a few words under his breath.

There was no puff of smoke, no flash of light. But it was as if his parents had been photographed and at the same time turned into those photographs. Mrs Eliot was halfway out of her chair, slumping towards the carpet. Mr Eliot was about to speak, his mouth open, his tongue hovering over his teeth.

It was a simple spell. But they would remain that way for the next three weeks.

David rubbed his black ring thoughtfully. He had spoken the words of power with perfect pronunciation. Mrs Windergast would have said that three weeks was overdoing it when a few hours would have been enough, but then she was a perfectionist and all David’s spells tended to be on the strong side. Maybe he was just a little enthusiastic.

He went upstairs and lay down on his bed. A chocolate milk shake materialized in thin air and began to float towards him. He was looking forward to the next term at Groosham Grange. He and Jill would both be taking their first GCSEs in the summer: Telepathy, Weather Control, Wax Modelling and (the trickiest of the four) Advanced Blood Sacrifice.

And what then? He sipped the milk shake and smiled. He’d got it exactly right – thick with plenty of chocolate. He still blushed when he remembered his first attempt. In cookery class he’d conjured up a perfect milk shake: banana flavour with two scoops of ice-cream. But he’d forgotten to include a glass. It was only recently that he’d got used to his powers, begun to enjoy them.

So what would he do with them? Black magic or white magic? Good or evil?

He would leave that decision until later – at least until he’d passed his exams. And David was certain that he would pass. He was the seventh son of a seventh son. And he had never felt better in his life.