Which Witches

chapter 1

As soon as he was born, Mr. and Mrs. Canker knew that their baby was not like other people 's children.
  
      For one thing, he was born with a full set of teeth and would in his pram for hours, chewing huge mutton bones to shreds or snapping at the noses of old ladies fool enough to kiss him. For another, though he screamed with temper when they changed his nappies, his eyes never actually filled with tears.  Also - and perhaps this was the strangest of all - as soon as they brought him home from the hospital and lit a nice, bright fire in the sitting room, the smoke from their chimney began to blow against the wind.

      For a while the canker were puzzled.  But as Mr. Canker said, there is a book about everything if you only know where to look, and one day he went to Todcaster public Library and began to read. He read and he read and he read , and what he read most about was black magic and sorcery and how to tell from a very early age whether someone is going to be a wizard or witch.
After which, he went and broke the News to Mrs. Canker.
      
          it was shock, of course . No one likes to think that their baby is going to be a wizard, and a black one at that. But the Cankers were responsible people. They changed the baby's name from George to Arriman ( after a famous and a very wicked Persian sorcerer), painted a Frieze of vampire bats and newt's tongues on his nursery wall, and decided that if he had to grow up to be a wizard they would see to it he was a good one.
        
          It wasn't easy. Todcaster , where they lived, was an ordinary town full of ordinary people. Though they encourage little Arriman to practice as much as possible, it was embarrassing to have their birdbath full of gloomy and lopsided vultures and to have to explain to their neighbors why their apple tree had turned overnight into a blackened stump shaped like a dead man's hand.

        Fortunately , wizards grow up quickly. By the time he was fifteen, Arriman could take a bus to Todcaster Common and raise a whirlwind that had every pair of knickers on every washing line in the area flying halfway to Jericho, and soon afterward he decided to leave home and set up on his own.

         The search for a new house took many months. Arriman didn't want a place that was sunny and cheerful or a place that was near a town, and though he wanted somewhere ruined and desolate , he was fussy about the kind of ghost it had. Never having had a sister , Arriman was a little shy with women, and he didn't fancy the idea of a wailing gray lady walking back and forth across his breakfast table while he ate his kippers , or a headless nun catching him in his bath.

         But at last he found Darkington Hall. It was a Gray, gloomy, sprawling building about thirty miles from Todcaster.  To the west of the hall was a sinister forest, to the north were bleak and windswept moors, and to the east, the Gray, relentlessly, pounding sea. What's more, than Darkington ghost was a gentleman, and the sort that Arriman thought he could well get on with:
Sir Simon Montpelier who , in the sixteenth century, had murdered all seven of his wives and now wandered about groaning with guilt , moaning with misery, and striking his forehead with a plashing sound.

          And here Arriman lived for many years, blighting and smiting, blasting and wuthering , and doing everything he could to keep darkness and sorcery alive in the land. He filled his battlement with screech owls and his cellars with salamanders. He lined the avenue with scorched tree stumps like gallows, and he dug a well in his courtyard from which brimstone and sulfur oozed horribly. He planted a yew - tree maze so complicated and devilish that no one had a hope of coming out alive, and he made the fountains on the terrace run with blood. There was only one thing he couldn't do he couldn't raise the ghost of sir Simon Montpelier. He would have liked to do this ; sir Simon would have been company. But bringing ghost back to life is the blackest and most difficult magic of all, and even Arriman couldn't managed it.