Class Six and the Nits of Doom (2 page)

‘Lamp posts.’

‘Pies.’

‘Zombies. Or mummies.’

‘Not mummies,’ said Slacker, spraying Class Six with pie crumbs. ‘She’d never find enough bandages to wrap me up.’

Rodney was looking at them as if they were mad. ‘That’s stupid. There’s no such things as witches. You all know that. Miss Broom’s just an ordinary boring old
teacher.’

And now it was Anil’s turn to stare at Rodney as if
he
was mad. But that was fair enough.

‘
What?
’ Anil said. ‘So where do you think all those owls came from? And that shower of bus tickets?’

‘The owls came out of a hole in her desk,’ Rodney answered. ‘You don’t have to be a witch to keep pets, do you? My nan’s got a ferret. And the bus tickets
probably...’ He frowned for a moment, thinking hard, and then his face brightened. ‘The bus tickets probably came off a bus!’ he finished up, triumphantly.

‘And where do you suppose the bus tickets all went, Rodney?’ asked Winsome, quite kindly. ‘I mean, once they’d stopped flying round the classroom like jet-powered moths
and singing that really high-pitched little song about always trusting Miss Broom and always doing as we were told?’

Rodney shrugged. ‘That was just an optical delusion.’

‘And so were all the gibbons,’ said Serise scathingly. ‘
And
the thunder and lightning coming out of the art cupboard.’

Rodney pulled up two bunches of scraggy weeds from the flowerbed behind him, rolled them up carefully, and stuck them in his ears.

That was the sort of thing he did all the time. No one knew why. Least of all Rodney.

‘There’s no such thing as witches,’ he said stubbornly. ‘And I bet I can prove it, too. All we have to do is make Miss Broom really annoyed, and if we don’t get
turned into toadstools then we’ll
know
she’s not a witch.’

The bell went for the end of break. Jack screamed and jumped so violently he ended up with his arms and legs wrapped round one of the netball posts.

‘That’s it,’ said Serise grimly. ‘We are
so
going to be dead.’

‘Well, at least if Rodney goes and annoys Miss Broom then he’ll be dead first,’ pointed out Anil, as they went to line up. ‘That’s something.’

But Winsome, who was very kind and sensible, pulled the bunches of weeds out of Rodney’s ear holes.

‘I think you’d best be good, Rodney,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Jack, flapping his fingers between horror and a sort of dreadful delight. ‘Go on, Rodney! You prove to us all that Miss Broom is just an ordinary human and not a
witch, and that all those sardines that Emily found in her drawer had swum there by themselves during the holidays.’

Rodney smiled happily. Not only was he easily the stupidest person in the class, he was probably the most obstinate, too.
And
the least able to recognise a really, really bad idea when he
heard one.

‘All right, then,’ he said, and led the way back to class.

Miss Broom wasn’t in the classroom when Class Six arrived. The children looked round anxiously, checking for sharks in the sink and ghosts hanging from the coat hooks, but everything
looked more or less normal. Even Emily’s drawer, once she’d bribed Slacker to open it for her by promising him her pudding at lunch time, proved to contain nothing more than her pencil
case and some exercise books.

‘I think there’s still a smell of fish, though,’ she said, sniffing cautiously.

Slacker Punchkin gave Emily’s English book a big fat lick.

‘No taste, though,’ he reported, with regret.

Jack was whispering excitedly to Rodney. ‘What are you going to do to prove Miss Broom’s not a witch?’ he asked. ‘What are you going to do? Hey? What are you going to
do?’

Rodney frowned and began twisting at one of his ears. He always did that when he tried thinking. The others had decided his brain must be clockwork, and needed winding up to make it work.

‘She
can’t
be a witch,’ he said. ‘There’s no such thing as witches.’

Anil clutched at his hair in disbelief.

‘Then what about all those spider webs in the rafters?’ he yelped. ‘The ones with our names woven into them? And what about when all our chairs turned into ponies and carried
us round the classroom so we were sitting in alphabetical order?’

‘What about that lizard playing
Magic Moments
on all those cucumbers that grew out of the bottom of the whiteboard?’ asked Winsome.

Rodney shrugged.

‘Like I said, those were just sceptical illusions,’ he said. ‘Anyway, if Miss Broom was a witch she’d have a broomstick, wouldn’t she? And she comes to school on a
bicycle.’

‘Yes, she does,’ agreed Anil. ‘A bicycle which goes along by itself without being pedalled. And has ears.’

‘Anyway, you don’t know she hasn’t got a broom,’ pointed out Slacker Punchkin. ‘She could have one at home. Or hidden somewhere.’

Everyone looked around the classroom.

‘It could be in that big cupboard that’s got DANGER written on the door,’ said Jack. ‘Hey, look, the door’s not closed properly. That bit of black material’s
got caught in it and it’s stopping it shutting.’

Class Six stared at the door, and they stared at the DANGER sign. The cupboard was big enough to hold all sorts of things. A bear. A full-sized knight in shining armour.

‘A cauldron and a book of spells,’ said Emily, shuddering.

Slacker Punchkin looked interested.

‘A cauldron?’ he echoed. ‘In there? Hey, I wonder if Miss Broom’s cooking anything?’

‘No,’ said Winsome quickly. ‘She couldn’t be. Not in a closed cupboard.’

Rodney heaved a great sigh.

‘But there
can’t
be a cauldron in the cupboard,’ he said. ‘Because there’s no such thing as magic. Look, I’ll show you.’

Before anyone could stop him he went over to the cupboard door and flung it open wide.

And everyone gasped.

Emily had been right. On the floor inside the cupboard was a small but definite cauldron. It was full of stuff that looked like turquoise bubble gum, and it was bubbling away in spite of the
fact there was no fire underneath it. The steam that swelled out into the classroom smelled of old plimsolls, peanuts and school dinners.

Emily pointed a trembling finger.

‘
Look
,’ she whispered.

On a hook on the inside of the door was something like an enormous bat skin.

‘A witch’s cloak!’ gasped Winsome.

‘With claws,’ said Anil, with a gulp.

Rodney put out a finger to scoop up some of the turquoise gunge from the cauldron, but Winsome ran over and grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t touch it!’ she said. ‘That’s
probably a spell! If you touch that, anything could happen. You could turn into a toad, and then you’d only be able to eat slugs and beetles.’

The others found they’d got up and were moving forward towards the cupboard almost without wanting to, as if their feet had developed minds of their own.

Slacker Punchkin licked his lips.

‘I bet slugs are really juicy,’ he said, as Winsome tried to get Rodney to come away from the cupboard.

‘We’d better close the door and go and sit down,’ she said. ‘Miss Broom will be here any minute and—’

‘Look at that!’ squawked Serise.

They all looked, and now their eyes had got used to the gloom inside the cupboard, they could see it. Beyond the shifting turquoise steam that rose from the cauldron there was something hanging
up on the back wall of the cupboard.

It was a hat.

The cloak hadn’t really looked all that different from the gowns teachers wear in cartoons, but there was no doubt about the hat. It was black, it had a broad rim, and the bit in the
middle came up to a point.

‘That
proves
it!’ breathed Jack. ‘That’s a real witch’s hat. It couldn’t possibly be anything else.’

But Rodney only hunched his shoulders.

‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ he said. ‘It’s probably fancy dress. I expect—’

‘Quick!’ squeaked Emily. There were footsteps just outside the door. ‘She’s coming! She’s coming!’

Everyone moved fast. Even Slacker Punchkin moved fast, charging across the classroom, scattering tables and chairs as he went. By the time Miss Broom’s splendid bosom appeared in the
doorway Class Six was sitting, arms folded, looking as innocent as they could.

Except for one of them.

Rodney Wright’s clockwork brain just wasn’t fast enough for emergencies, and the children saw to their horror that Rodney was still standing in the cupboard doorway winding up his
ear.

Miss Broom was walking across the classroom to her desk, and in another couple of seconds she was going to turn round. And then she’d see him. Worse than that, she’d see the open
cupboard and know that Class Six had seen the cauldron. And the witch’s cloak. And the hat.

Luckily, Anil’s brain had a gold-plated hard drive. In the final second before Miss Broom’s round bottom plumped down onto her seat he put out a foot and kicked the cupboard door
closed.

Everyone in Class Six heard the
click!
as it shut.

And Rodney, who was now locked inside the cupboard, heard it best of all.

The whole class froze with horror. Rodney was trapped inside the cupboard. Rodney, who was so stupid he didn’t believe in witches even after he’d seen the dancing
skeletons in Miss Broom’s eyes. Any moment now he might start hammering on the door and then—

‘Now,’ said Miss Broom, smiling a wide smile that was at least three centimetres wider than any smile Class Six had ever seen before. ‘We’ve welcomed all the sweet and
juicy new little Year Threes to the school at assembly, and we’ve given out all our exercise books, so we’d better get down to some work. Right, then...’

Her bright orange eyes swept the classroom and everyone hunched down as small as they could and tried to be invisible.

‘Jack,’ said Miss Broom.

The rest of Class Six felt relieved for a second, and then got all anxious again. Jack wasn’t as stupid as Rodney, but he wasn’t one of the clever ones. Why, he was Rodney’s
best friend, so that proved it. There was no way he was going to be able to fool a witch.

Jack gulped.

‘Yes, Miss Broom?’

‘Do you know your nineteen times table, dear?’

A wave of panic and dismay went round Class Six. Nineteen times table? They’d learned up to ten times, and
that
had taken ages and ages.
Nineteen?

But before Jack could reply, Miss Broom’s desk drawer opened all by itself and something came out of it. It was something long and slithery. And scaly. It was the same orange as Miss
Broom’s eyes, and it had black Xs all the way down its back.

It rippled down onto Miss Broom’s lap, and then up over her big bosom to coil round her neck.

Class Six closed their eyes, crossed their fingers, and opened them again. Then they tried it again. But the big orange thing was still there, and it was still most definitely a large fat
snake.

‘Aargh!’ said Emily faintly.

Miss Broom laughed. It was a musical laugh, but it was like icicles falling onto a frozen pond and it sent shivers down everyone’s spines.

‘There’s no need to be worried, Emily, dear,’ she said. ‘Algernon is going to help us learn our tables.’

Algernon raised his head and stared beadily at Class Six, and Class Six stared back, transfixed.

Winsome suddenly found her mind had gone so misty she couldn’t see from one end of a thought to the other.
I’m being hypnotised,
she realised. But then that thought dissolved
into mist, too, and she was left staring and staring and staring at Algernon’s swaying head.

Algernon opened his mouth. Wider and wider and wider it went. It opened to the size of an orange, and then to the size of a dinner plate, and then to the size of a barrel. All Class Six could do
was stare down past his gleaming sickle fangs and into the blackness of his throat.

And then, before Class Six had time to work out what was going on, a flock of poison-green scissor-shapes zoomed out of Algernon’s mouth and came flying straight towards them.

The quickest of the children ducked down under their tables, but it was no good. The scissor-shapes swooped and slipped through the air, fast as bats, and in a few seconds they had wrapped
themselves round the wrists of everyone in Class Six.