A Hat Full Of Sky

O-K, she thought. Another strange thing. Well, this is a witch’s cottage.

Something pulled at the spoon but, again, stopped as soon as she tugged back.

Tiffany put the empty bowl and spoon back on the tray.

‘All right,’ she said, hoping she sounded not scared at all. ‘I’ve finished.’

The tray rose into the air and drifted gently towards the door where it landed with a faint tinkle.

Up on the door, the bolt slid back.

The door opened.

The tray rose up and sailed through the doorway.

The door shut.

The bolt slid across.

Tiffany heard the rattle of the spoon as, somewhere on the dark landing, the tray moved on.

It seemed to Tiffany that it was vitally important that she thought before doing anything. And so she thought: It would be stupid to run around screaming because your tray had been taken away. After all, whatever had done it had even had the decency to bolt the door after itself, which meant that it respected her privacy, even while it ignored it.

She cleaned her teeth at the washstand, got into her nightgown and slid into the bed. She blew out the candle.

After a moment she got up, relit the candle, and with some effort dragged the chest of drawers in front of the door. She wasn’t quite certain why, but she felt better for doing it.

She lay back in the dark again.

Tiffany was used to sleeping while, outside on the downland, sheep baa’d and sheep bells occasionally went tonk.

Up here, there were no sheep to baa and no bells to tonk, and every time one didn’t, she woke up thinking, What was that?

But she did get to sleep eventually, because she remembered waking up in the middle of the night to hear the chest of drawers very slowly slide back to its original position.

Tiffany woke up, still alive and not chopped up, when the dawn was just turning grey. Unfamiliar birds were singing.

There were no sounds in the cottage, and she thought: I’m the apprentice, aren’t I? I’m the one who should be cleaning up and getting the fire lit. I know how this is supposed to go.

She sat up and looked around the room.

Her old clothes had been neatly folded on top of the chest of drawers. The fossil and the lucky stone and the other things had gone, and it was only after a frantic search that she found them back in the box in her suitcase.

‘Now, look,’ she said to the room in general. ‘I am a hag, you know. If there are any Nac Mac Feegle here, step out this minute!’

Nothing happened. She hadn’t expected anything to happen. The Nac Mac Feegle weren’t particularly interested in tidying things up, anyway.

As an experiment she took the candlestick off the bedside table, put it on the chest of drawers and stood back. More nothing happened.

She turned to look out of the window and, as she did so, there was a faint blint noise.

When she spun round, the candlestick was back on the table.

Well… today was going to be a day when she got answers. Tiffany enjoyed the slightly angry feeling. It stopped her thinking about how much she wanted to go home.

She went to put her dress on and realized that there was something soft yet crackly in a pocket.

Oh, how could she have forgotten? But it had been a busy day, a very busy day, and maybe she’d wanted to forget, anyway.

She pulled out Roland’s present and opened the white tissue paper carefully.

It was a necklace.

It was the Horse.

Tiffany stared at it.

Not what a horse looks like, but what a horse be… It had been carved in the turf back before history began, by people who had managed to convey in a few flowing lines everything a horse was: strength, grace, beauty and speed, straining to break free of the hill.

And now someone—someone clever and, therefore, probably also someone expensive—had made it out of silver. It was flat, just like it was on the hillside and, just like the Horse on the hillside, some parts of it were not joined to the rest of the body. The craftsman, though, had joined these carefully together with tiny silver chain, so that when Tiffany held it up in astonishment it was all there, moving-while-standing-still in the morning light.

She had to put it on. And… there was no mirror, not even a tiny hand one. Oh, well…

‘See me,’ said Tiffany.

And far away, down on the plains, something that had lost the trail awoke. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the mist on the fields parted as something invisible started to move, making a noise like a swarm of flies…

Tiffany shut her eyes, took a couple of small steps sideways, a few steps forward, turned round and carefully opened her eyes again. There she stood, in front of her, as still as a picture. The Horse looked very well on the new dress, silver against green.

She wondered how much it must have cost Roland. She wondered why.

‘See me not,’ she said. Slowly she took the necklace off, wrapped it up again in its tissue paper and put it in the box with the other things from home. Then she found one of the postcards from Twoshirts, and a pencil, and with care and attention, wrote Roland a short thank-you note. After a flash of guilt she carefully used the other postcard to tell her parents that she was completely still alive.

Then, thoughtfully, she went downstairs.

It had been dark last night, so she hadn’t noticed the posters stuck up all down the stairs. They were from circuses, and were covered with clowns and animals and that old-fashioned poster lettering where no two lines of type are the same.

They said things like:

Thrills Galore! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

Professor Monty Bladde’s Three Ring Circus and Cabinet of Curiosities

See the Amazing Dislocating Jack Put A Lion’s Head In His Actual Mouth!!!

See the Horse With his Head Where His Tail Should Be!

***** See the Egress!!!!! *****

CLOWNS! CLOWNS! CLOWNS!

The Flying Pastrami Brothers will defy gravity, The Greatest Force in the Universe - without a net—