Which Witches

chapter 2

The years passed. Though he seldom left the hall, Arriman fame was spreading. People called him Arriman the Awful. Loather of light, and wizard of the North. Stories began to be told about him: how he could make the thunder come before the lightning, that he was friends with Beelzebub himself. But Arriman just went on working. He had grown to be a tall and handsome man with dark, flashing eyes a curved nose like the prow of a viking ship and a flourishing mustache, but despite his fine looks, he was not at all conceited .
    
             In the years that followed, Arriman set up a private zoo in which he kept all the nastiest and ugliest animals he could find: monkeys with bald faces and blue behinds, camels with sneering lips and lumpy knees, wallabies with feet like railway sleepers that kicked everything in sight. He turned the billiard room into a laboratory in which fiendish things bubbled all Day long, giving off appalling smells , and he called in rain clouds from the Sea to drip relentlessly onto his roof.
                Then one day he woke up feeling miserable. He knew he ought to get up and throw someone into the well or order a stinking emu for the zoo or mix something poisonous in his laboratory, but he just couldn't face it.

   "Lester, " he said to the servant who bought him his breakfast.  " I feel tired. Wreary. Bored."

Lester was an ogre,   a huge, slow - moving man with muscles like footballs.  Like most ogres, he had only one eye in the middle of his forehead, but so as not to upset people he wore a black eye patch above it to make people think he had two. Before he came to be Arriman 's servant,  Lester has been a sword swallower in a fair, and he still liked to gulp down the odd saber or fencing foil. It soothed him.

          Now he looked down anxiously at his master.  " Do you sir ? he said.

     "Yes, I do. In fact, I don't know if I can go on much longer. I thought I might go away somewhere, Lester.
Take a little room in the pretty market town perhaps and write a book".

       The ogre was shocked. " But what would happen to blackness and evil, sir ? ".

      Arriman frowned. " I know, I know. I have a duty, I see that. But how long am I supposed to go on like this ? How long , Lester? " The frown deepened and he waved his arms in desperation. " How long ? "

        Lester wasn't the stupid kind of ogre who goes around saying " Fe Fi Fo Fun " all the time. So now he looked at his master and said " well , I wouldn't know, sir. Ogres can't tell the future, you know. Gypsies can, though. Why don't you go and have your fortune told ?
There was a gypsy where I worked.  Esmeralda, they called her. Knew her stuff, she did ".

         So the following week, Arriman and Lester drove into Todcaster to find the fair.

        They found Esmeralda's caravan quite easily. You could tell it from the other gypsy caravans because the people who came out of it looked as though they didn't know what had hit them.
      "She tells the truth, " explained Lester, sniffing happily at the remembered fairground smells: fried onions from the harmburger stall, hot engine oil from the bumper cars........
" None of that garbage about dark strangers and journey across the Sea".

Esmeralda was a frizzy - haired lady in a pink satin blouse. Arriman had left off his magician's cloak and changed into a gray pinstripe, but the look she gave him was very sharp indeed.
    " For you it 'ii be a fiver, she said. " Sit down "
She pocketed the money, took a swig from a bottle labeled Gordon's Gin, and began to stare into her crystal ball.
     She stared for a long time. Then she pushed the ball away and lit a cigarette.   " It's all right, " she said.
" He's coming. "
      " Who ? Said Arriman eagerly. " Who's coming ? "
      " The new bloke, " said Esmeralda. " The one that's going to take over from you. "
 
Arriman looked bewildered. " What new bloke? "

Esmeralda closed her eyes wearily.
" Do you want me to spell it out for you ? " She put on a posh voice and droned: " soon there cometh a great new wizard whose power shall be mightier and darker even than your own. When this great new wizard cometh, you, Arriman the Awful, will be able to lay down the burden of darkness and evil which you have carried for so long. "
She opened her eyes. " Got it ? "  She said nastily.

   " Oh yes, yes !" said Arriman happily.
" I suppose you don't know when he cometh? "
     "No," snapped Esmeralda, " I don't.  Next customer, please."

After his visit to Esmeralda, Arriman was a happy man.
Just to fill in time he planted a brier hedge whose thorns oozed blood, ran an oil tanker aground on the cliffs nearby, and invented a new spell for making people's hair fall out. But most of the time he spent by the main gate, watching and waiting for the new wizard to come.

         It was cold work. Darkington Hall was as far north as you could get without bumping into Scotland, and when, after a week, Arriman found a chilblain on his left toe , he very sensibly decided to make a wizard watcher.