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‘I think so,’ I said. ‘It's a very small bottle.’
‘I'm frightened of that stuff,’ my grandmother said. ‘What would you do with it if you did manage to get it?’
‘One bottle is enough for five hundred people,’ I said. ‘That would give each and every witch down there a double dose at least. We could turn them all into mice.’
My grandmother jumped about an inch in the air. We were out on my balcony and there was a drop of about a million feet below us and I very nearly bounced out of her hand over the railings when she jumped.
‘Be careful with me, Grandmamma,’ I said.
‘What an idea!’ she cried. ‘It's fantastic! It's tremendous! You're a genius, my darling!’
‘Wouldn't it be something?’ I said. ‘Wouldn't that really be something?’
‘We'd get rid of every witch in England in one swoop!’ she cried. ‘And The Grand High Witch into the bargain!’
‘We've got to try it,’ I said.
‘Listen,’ she said, nearly dropping me over the balcony once again in her excitement. ‘If we brought this off, it would be the greatest triumph in the whole history of witchery!’
‘There's a lot of work to do,’ I said.
‘Of course there's a lot of work to do,’ she said. ‘Just for a start, supposing you did manage to get hold of one of those bottles, how would you get it into their food?’
‘We'll work that out later,’ I said. ‘Let's try to get the stuff first. How can we find out for sure if that's her room just below us?’
‘We shall check it out immediately!’ my grandmother cried. ‘Come along! There's not a second to waste!’ Carrying me in one hand, she went bustling out of the bedroom and along the corridor, banging her stick on the carpet with each step she took. We went down the stairs one flight to the fourth floor. The bedrooms on either side of the corridor had their numbers painted on the doors in gold.
‘Here it is!’ my grandmother cried. ‘Number 454.’ She tried the door. It was locked of course. She looked up and down the long empty hotel corridor. ‘I do believe you're right,’ she said. ‘This room is almost certainly directly below yours.’ She marched back along the corridor, counting the number of doors from The Grand High Witch's room to the staircase. There were six.
She climbed back up to the fifth floor and repeated the exercise.
‘She is directly below you!’ my grandmother cried out. ‘Her room is right below yours!’
She carried me back into my own bedroom and went out once again on to the balcony. ‘That's her balcony down there,’ she said. ‘And what's more, the door from her balcony into her bedroom is wide open! How are you going to climb down?’
‘I don't know,’ I said. Our rooms were in the front of the hotel and they looked down on to the beach and the sea. Immediately below my balcony, thousands of feet below, I could see a fence of spiked railings. If I fell, I'd be a gonner.
‘I've got it!’ my grandmother cried. With me in her hand, she rushed back into her own room and began rummaging in the chest-of-drawers. She came out with a ball of blue knitting-wool. One end of it was attached to some needles and a half-finished sock she had been knitting for me. ‘This is perfect,’ she said. ‘I shall put you in the sock and lower you down on to The Grand High Witch's balcony. But we must hurry! Any moment now that monster will be returning to her room!’
The Mouse-Burglar
My grandmother hustled me back into my own bedroom and out on to the balcony. ‘Are you ready?’ she asked. ‘I'm going to put you in the sock now.’
‘I hope I can manage this,’ I said. ‘I'm only a little mouse.’
‘You'll manage,’ she said. ‘Good luck, my darling.’ She popped me into the sock and started lowering me over the balcony. I crouched inside the sock and held my breath. Through the stitches I could see out quite clearly. Miles below me, the children playing on the beach were the size of beetles. The sock started swinging in the breeze. I looked up and saw my grandmother's head sticking out over the railings of the balcony above. ‘You're nearly there!’ she called out. ‘Here we go! Gently does it. You're down!’
I felt a slight bump. ‘In you go!’ my grandmother was shouting. ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry! Search the room!’
I jumped out of the sock and ran into The Grand High Witch's bedroom. There was the same musty smell about the place that I had noticed in the Ballroom. It was the stench of witches. It reminded me of the smell inside the men's public lavatory at our local railway-station.
As far as I could see, the room was tidy enough. There was no sign anywhere that it was inhabited by anyone but an ordinary person. But then there wouldn't be, would there? No witch would be stupid enough to leave anything suspicious lying around for the hotel maid to see.
Suddenly I saw a frog jumping across the carpet and disappearing under the bed. I jumped myself.
‘Hurry up!’ came my grandmother's voice from somewhere high up outside. ‘Grab the stuff and get out!’
I started skittering round and trying to search the room. This wasn't so easy. I couldn't, for example, open any of the drawers. I couldn't open the doors of the big wardrobe either. I stopped skittering about. I sat in the middle of the floor and had a think. If The Grand High Witch wanted to hide something top secret, where would she put it? Certainly not in any ordinary drawer. Not in the wardrobe either. It was too obvious. I jumped up on to the bed to get a better view of the room. Hey, I thought, what about under the mattress? Very carefully, I lowered myself over the edge of the bed and wormed my way underneath the mattress. I had to push forward hard to make any headway, but I kept at it. I couldn't see a thing. I was scrabbling about under the mattress when my head suddenly bumped against something hard inside the mattress above me. I reached up and felt it with my paw. Could it be a little bottle? It was a little bottle! I could trace the shape of it through the cloth of the mattress. And right alongside it, I felt another hard lump, and another and another. The Grand High Witch must have slit open the mattress and put all the bottles inside and then sewn it all up again. I began tearing away frantically at the mattress cloth above my head with my teeth. My front teeth were extremely sharp and it didn't take me long to make a small hole. I climbed into the hole and grabbed a bottle by the neck. I pushed it down through the hole in the mattress and climbed out after it.
