The Witch of Clatteringshaws (13 page)

He walked toward the black booming cloud with his arms and hands held wide, fingers spread out.

“Guess he knows what he’s about,” muttered Dido. “I jist hope the bees get the message too.”

“Bees! Kind hands!” said Malise. “Now I remember—in the street in Clarion Wells, when I ran out—”

“How do the bees know that Simon is their friend?” said the Woodlouse anxiously.

“They just know.”

It seemed that they did know. The black and gold cloud narrowed into a funnel shape and poured itself like molasses between Simon’s wrists, down his arms, and over his head and shoulders. Moving slowly and steadily, he walked across the coach park, stepping over a number of prone troopers on his way, and approached the little stone building.

Proceeding with equal caution, Dido made her way there at the same time, arrived just before him, and opened the door.

The bees peeled themselves off Simon and poured into the hut, where they hung from the ceiling like a huge stalactite. Simon gently opened the window and closed the door.

“Malise had better put up a sign,
BEES IN RESIDENCE
,” he said.

“Simon! Ain’t you stung at
all
?”

“Not a sting!” he said. “But I do feel rather sticky.” His head and arms were glazed with a thin film of honey.

“
Simon!”
said Malise. “Did you once take a swarm of bees out of a house in Clarion Wells?”

“Why, yes,” he said. “A long time ago. When I was quite small, traveling with a tinker, I was in that town. And a monk came up to me in the street and said I looked as if I had kind hands and could I help with a swarm that had entered the infirmary. It was a theological college. There was a dying man and they didn’t want him disturbed.”

“And you took the bees away?”

“I took the bees into the college garden, where there was a hive waiting for them—”

“But the dying man—did he
say
anything while you were in the room?”

“Yes, he did! But I didn’t understand what he said. The bees were buzzing … and the man was singing—well, chanting. He had put words to a street ballad tune that a man was playing outside the window—”

“First is cursed,” said the parrot. “Second is never. Third lasts forever. Young Billy must be found.”

“The parrot was there in the room,” said Simon. “On the windowsill. I suppose it was this parrot? The man sang:

“But what did it mean? What did he mean?”

“I asked him that. He just said, ‘Cracky Billy must be found,’ and stopped breathing.”

“Cracky Billy!” said Piers. “That was what the other boys called me at school.”

“Of course, now I understand he was saying
Richard
goes to ground—not Rich Heart. It was hard to hear him because of the bees buzzing. And after he said that, he died.”

The soldiers of the two armies were picking themselves up off the ground. They had slept all day, and, full of a huge Scottish tea, which the ladies of Clatteringshaws had provided, they were feeling cheerful, and burst into the songs they had sung as they marched.

A tempest of sound swept across the valley. And the hordes of Hobyahs who had come out after sunset, eager to surge up the hill and demolish the happy, careless warriors, began to dwindle and shrink and crumple. Their faulty little prehistoric nerve systems could not stand up
to the strong regular beat of the music; they whimpered and shivered and began to dissolve like butter melting on a griddle.

By the time the moon had risen, casting its solemn light over the waters of the loch and the granite roofs of Clatteringshaws, there were no Hobyahs left, only a mass of little black shriveled husks, lying knee-deep across the hillside.

“Think of it, Simon!” Dido said happily. “Pa’s songs! They’ve really come in handy at last!”

Like Dido, you may still be wondering what the Hobyahs were and where they came from, and the answer is that we shall probably never know. They appeared in folk stories more than a hundred years ago and were so scary and inscrutable—perhaps because no one ever described how they looked, as they only came out at night—that their fame has spread as far as America and Australia, where tales are still told about them. Joan Aiken said that your imagination is the greatest gift you have; life will always be a mystery, but through the stories we share, we can find our way of coming to terms with it. There’s an old Chinese proverb about a very large goose in a very small bottle. How do you get it out? You imagine it out! So, although we can be sure that the Hobyahs are all gone now, they come back when we read about them. How to get rid of them? That’s up to you!

(If in doubt, sing.…)

The Tatzelwurm is another creature whose fame has
grown through the power of storytelling. In the Alps in Switzerland, travelers and farmers claimed to have seen strange creatures, even up until fifty years ago, that came to be known as Tatzelwurms, from the German words for “paw” or “claw” and “worm,” so perhaps this beast was something like a dragon, a large lizard with legs. Some even claimed to have found a mysterious skeleton. But, like the people of Clatteringshaws, these travelers couldn’t help wanting to make their stories more exciting, so the Tatzelwurm grew “teeth the length of my forearm! Eyes that burned like firecrackers! Scales! Spikes! Smoking breath!” and much more besides. Malise’s Tatzen was friendly and polite, and I hope he lived to a comfortable old age in Wendsleydale.

Lizza Aiken 2004

Joan Aiken was born in Sussex, England, to American poet Conrad Aiken and his Canadian wife, Jessie McDonald Aiken. She wrote more than a hundred books for young readers and adults. Perhaps her best-known books for children are the Wolves Chronicles, which began with the now classic
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
, for which she won the Lewis Carroll Award. Her novels are internationally acclaimed, and, among other honors, she was a recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the United States and the
Guardian
Award in her native England. Joan Aiken was awarded the title Member of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999.