Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

had games with Miss Hodge and rice pudding and there are still about a hundred years of today to go. And that, he thought, about summed it up.
    When the bell rang, Mr. Crossley hurried to pick up the books he had been marking in order to get to the staff room before Miss Hodge left it. And stared. There was another note under the pile of books. It was written in the same capitals and the same blue ballpoint as the first note. It said: HA HA. THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO TELL YOU. DIDN’T YOU?
    Now what do I do? wondered Mr. Crossley.

4

    A T THE END OF LESSONS , there was the usual stampede to be elsewhere. Theresa and her friends, Delia, Heather, Deborah, Julia, and the rest, raced to the lower school girls’ playroom to grab the radiators there, so that they could sit on them and knit. Estelle and Karen hurried to get the chillier radiators in the corridor, and sat on them to cast on their stitches. Simon led his friends to the labs, where they added to Simon’s collection of honor marks by helping tidy up. Dan Smith left his friends to play football without him, because he had business in the shrubbery, watching the senior boys meeting their senior girl friends there. Charles crawled reluctantly to the locker room to look for his running shoes again. Nan went, equally reluctantly, up to Mr. Wentworth’s study.
    There was someone else in with Mr. Wentworth when she got there. She could hear voices and see two misty shapes through the wobbly glass in the door. Nan did not mind. The longer the interview was put off the better. So she hung about in the passage for nearly twenty minutes, until a passing monitor asked her what she was doing there.
    “Waiting to see Mr. Wentworth,” Nan said. Then, of course, in order to prove it to the monitor, she was forced to knock at the door.
    “Come in!” bawled Mr. Wentworth.
    The monitor, placated, passed on down the passage. Nan put out her hand to open the door, but, before she could, it was pulled open by Mr. Wentworth himself and Mr. Crossley came out, rather red and laughing sheepishly.
    “I still swear it wasn’t there when I put the books down,” he said.
    “Ah, but you know you didn’t look, Harold,” Mr. Wentworth said. “Our practical joker relied on your not looking. Forget it, Harold. So there you are, Nan. Did you lose your way here? Come on in. Mr. Crossley’s just going.”
    He went back to his desk and sat down. Mr. Crossley hovered for a moment, still rather red, and then hurried away downstairs, leaving Nan to shut the door. As she did so, she noticed that Mr. Wentworth was staring at three pieces of paper on his desk as if he thought they might bite him. She saw that one was in Miss Hodge’s writing and that the other two were scraps of paper with blue capital letters on them, but she was much too worried on her own account to bother about pieces of writing.
    “Explain your behavior at high table,” Mr. Wentworth said to her.
    Since there really was no explanation that Nan could see, she said, in a miserable whisper, “I can’t, sir,” and looked down at the parquet floor.
    “Can’t?” said Mr. Wentworth. “You put Lord Mulke off his lunch for no reason at all! Tell me another. Explain yourself.”
    Miserably, Nan fitted one of her feet exactly into one of the parquet oblongs in the floor. “I don’t know, sir. I just said it.”
    “You don’t know, you just said it,” said Mr. Wentworth. “Do you mean by that that you found yourself speaking without knowing you were?”
    This was meant to be sarcasm, Nan knew. But it seemed to be true as well. Carefully, she fitted her other shoe into the parquet block which slanted towards her first foot, and stood unsteadily, toe to toe, while she wondered how to explain. “I didn’t know what I was going to say next, sir.”
    “Why not?” demanded Mr. Wentworth.
    “I don’t know,” Nan said. “It was like—like being possessed.”
    “Possessed!” shouted Mr. Wentworth. It was the way he shouted