The Witch of Clatteringshaws by Joan Aiken Read Free Book Online

left the empty picnic hamper in the train; all the food had been eaten, and the plates and forks were heavy.)
    “Juist mak’ yerselves at hame,” said the man hospitably. “I’ll be locking up, whiles.”
    He locked every door in the small building. “There’s a fine wee bench out yonder against the fence. I’m off hame the noo.” And he walked away over a heathery slope.
    “It’s cold up here,” said the Woodlouse. The station was on a hilltop. Far below them glimmered the dark water of the loch, which they had just crossed on a bridge that seemed to go on for miles and was slung high above the water from one hill summit to another. A few lights down near the water’s edge were presumably the town of Clatteringshaws. Their train had retreated the same way it had come, and the empty countryside was silent, except for the chuntering of some night bird.
    “I reckon Father Sam wasn’t wrong when he said Scotland was a big empty place,” said Dido, shivering.
    “Should make it easier to find one king in it.”
    “Hark. What’s that creaking noise?”
    “The train coming back?”
    “No—sounds like the lid on a pot of boiling water—
there!
”
    The sound came nearer, came quite close, then faded again.
    “Now it’s getting louder—”
    “Blest if it’s not right above us!”
    The sky was cloudy and dim. When they looked up, snow peppered their faces.
    “There—see!”
    “What was it?”
    “Looked like a big three-legged bird?”
    “That was no bird. It was as big as a stag.”
    “They don’t have flying stags. Specially three-legged ones.”
    “How could you possibly tell that it was three-legged?”
    At this moment Fergie McDune came back, driving his gig.
    “Ye’ll be for the town?”
    “Yes, please. Someplace where we can get a bed for the night.”
    “Ah, that’ll be Lachie Mackintosh, the Monster’s Arms.”
    McDune cracked his whip and they set off down the hill.
    “That’s a funny name for an inn—the Monster’s Arms?” suggested Piers.
    “Why? Would you have him call it the Monster’s Legs?”
    “Do you have many monsters round here?”
    “Ilka land has its ain lauch,” said Fergie, which response so perplexed his customers that they kept silent for the rest of the drive.
    Clatteringshaws seemed a larger town than they had expected, with a wide main street and gaunt, high buildings, but it was a very silent place, with no one about in the street and few lights in the curtained windows. The main street led directly to the lochside, where the Monster’s Arms, a fair-sized timber-framed inn, stood beside the boat jetty.
    To their great relief the inn promised them beds for the night, and provided a welcome dinner of calf’s-head ragout, bullock’s tongue, and potato cakes.
    It had been a long day, and Dido and Piers were glad toretire, as soon as they had eaten the last lump of potato cake, to beds that proved to be equally lumpy, and so damp that Dido wondered if hers had been dipped in the loch to expel bugs.
    Halfway through a restless night spent trying to find an island in the mattress-swamp, she remembered where she had seen a ring like that of the woman on the train.
    It was on the finger of Father Sam.
    Is that the same ring, or is there someplace where they sell them, like those painted mugs that say “A Present from the Tower of London”? Dido wondered, wriggling in an effort to find a dry spot in her bed. Could that woman have been Father Sam’s cousin? What was she doing on the train?
    At last Dido fell asleep.
    In the morning they were given bowls of gray glue for breakfast.
    “ ’Tis parritch,” said the whiskered waiter who served them. “Forbye ye should eat it standing up.”
    “I’m not sure as I want to eat it
at all
,” said Dido. “But why standing up?”
    “ ’Tis a token of respect.”
    “I’d sooner respect a dish of bacon and eggs.”
    “Och, ye’ll no’ get that this morn.”
    “Why not?”
    “ ’Tis Saint Vinnipag’s