Beware! Read online

  They were on five now. It occurred to him to press seven, get off there, and walk the rest of the way. And he would have done it, if he could have reached the buttons. But there was no room to get past her without squeezing against her, and he could not bear the thought of any physical contact with her. He concentrated on being in his room. He would be home soon, only another minute or so. He could stand anything for a minute, even this crazy lady watching him.

  Unless the elevator got stuck between floors. Then what would he do? He tried to push the thought away, but it kept coming back. He looked at her. She was still staring at him, no expression at all on her squashed little features.

  When the elevator stopped on his floor, she barely moved out of the way. He had to inch past her, rubbing against her horrible scratchy coat, terrified the door would close before he made it through. She quickly turned and watched him as the door slammed shut. And he thought, Now she knows I live on seventeen.

  “Did you ever notice a strange fat lady on the elevator?” he asked his father that evening.

  “Can’t say as I have,” he said, not looking away from the television.

  He knew he was probably making a mistake, but he had to tell somebody. “Well, she was on the elevator with me twice today. And the funny thing was, she just kept staring at me, she never stopped looking at me for a minute. You think . . . you know of anybody who has a weird cleaning lady or anything?”

  “What are you so worked up about now?” his father said, turning impatiently away from the television.

  “I’m not worked up. It was just funny the way she kept staring at me. You know how people never look at each other in the elevator. Well, she just kept looking at me.”

  “What am I going to do with you, Martin?” his father said. He sighed and shook his head. “Honestly, now you’re afraid of some poor old lady.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “You’re afraid,” said his father, with total assurance. “When are you going to grow up and act like a man? Are you going to be timid all your life?”

  He managed not to cry until he got to his room—but his father probably knew he was crying anyway. He slept very little.

  And in the morning, when the elevator door opened, the fat lady was waiting for him.

  She was expecting him. She knew he lived on seventeen. He stood there, unable to move, and then backed away. And as he did so, her expression changed. She smiled as the door slammed.

  He ran for the stairs. Luckily, the unlit flight on which he fell was between sixteen and fifteen. He only had to drag himself up one and a half flights with the terrible pain in his leg. His father was silent on the way to the hospital, disappointed and annoyed at him for being such a coward and a fool.

  It was a simple fracture. He didn’t need a wheelchair, only a cast and crutches. But he was condemned to the elevator now. Was that why the fat lady had smiled? Had she known it would happen this way?

  At least his father was with him on the elevator on the way back from the hospital. There was no room for the fat lady to get on. And even if she did, his father would see her, he would realize how peculiar she was, and then maybe he would understand. And once they got home, he could stay in the apartment for a few days—the doctor had said he should use the leg as little as possible. A week, maybe—a whole week without going on the elevator. Riding up with his father, leaning on his crutches, he looked around the little cubicle and felt a kind of triumph. He had beaten the elevator, and the fat lady, for the time being. And the end of the week was very far away.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” his father reached out his hand and pressed nine.

  “What are you doing? You’re not getting off, are you?” he asked him, trying not to sound panicky.

  “I promised Terry Ullman I’d drop in on her,” his father said, looking at his watch as he stepped off.

  “Let me go with you. I want to visit her, too,” Martin pleaded, struggling forward on his crutches.

  But the door was already closing. “Afraid to be on the elevator alone?” his father said, with a look of total scorn. “Grow up, Martin.” The door slammed shut.

  Martin hobbled to the buttons and pressed nine, but it didn’t do any good. The elevator stopped at ten, where the fat lady was waiting for him. She moved in quickly; he was too slow, too unsteady on his crutches to work his way past her in time. The door sealed them in; the elevator started up.

  “Hello, Martin,” she said, and laughed, and pushed the Stop button.

  The Witches

  by Roald Dahl

  ILLUSTRATED BY QUENTIN BLAKE

  You are trapped in a room filled with two hundred witches. Witches who remove their faces to reveal their shrunken, shriveled, crumpled, rotting faces beneath. Witches who are dedicated to Cruelty for Children.

  Frightening? Funny? Time to open your mouth and scream?

  Yes.

  People of all ages love Roald Dahl’s delightfully devilish creations. I read his adult stories before I discovered his children’s books, and I loved them. Dahl has such a wicked view of the world. In his stories, quiet, normal people often turn out to be evil in the most surprising ways.

  But I like his children’s stories even better. Here is one of my favorite, frightful scenes from The Witches. Watch out! The Grand High Witch is about to enter now. . . .

  THE WITCHES

  by Roald Dahl

  THE MEETING

  Now that the Manager had gone, I was not particularly alarmed. What better than to be imprisoned in a room full of these splendid ladies. If I ever got talking to them, I might even suggest that they come and do a bit of cruelty-to-children-preventing at my school. We could certainly use them there.

  In they came, talking their heads off as women always do when you get a whole bunch of them together. They began milling around and choosing their seats, and there was a whole lot of stuff like, “Come and sit next to me, Millie dear,” and “Oh, hel-lo, Beatrice! I haven’t seen you since the last meeting! What an adorable dress you have on!”

  I decided to stay where I was and let them get on with their meeting while I got on with my mouse training, but I watched them for a while longer through the crack in the screen, waiting for them to settle down. How many were there? I guessed about two hundred. The back rows filled up first. They all seemed to want to sit as far back from the platform as possible.

  In the middle of the back row there was a lady wearing a tiny green hat who kept scratching the nape of her neck. She couldn’t leave it alone. It fascinated me the way her fingers kept scratching away at the hair on the back of her neck. Had she known somebody was watching her from behind, I’m sure she would have been embarrassed. I wondered if she had dandruff. All of a sudden I noticed that the lady next to her was doing the same thing!

  And the next one!

  And the next!

  The whole lot of them were doing it. They were all scratching away like mad at the hair on the backs of their necks!

  Did they have fleas in their hair?

  More likely it was nits.

  A boy at school called Ashton had had nits in his hair last term and the matron had made him dip his whole head in turpentine. It killed the nits all right, but it nearly killed Ashton as well. Half the skin came way from his scalp.

  I began to be fascinated by these hair-scratching ladies. It is always funny when you catch someone doing something coarse and she thinks no one is looking. Nose picking, for example, or scratching her bottom. Hair scratching is very nearly as unattractive, especially if it goes on and on.

  I decided it had to be nits.

  Then the most astonishing thing happened. I saw one lady pushing her fingers up underneath the hair on her head, and the hair, the entire head of hair, lifted upward all in one piece, and the hand slid underneath the hair and went on scratching!

  She was wearing a wig! She was also wearing gloves! I glanced swiftly around at the rest of the now seated audience. Every one of them was wearing gloves!<
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  My blood turned to ice. I began to shake all over. I glanced frantically behind me for a back door to escape through. There wasn’t one.

  Should I leap out from behind the screen and make a dash for the double doors?

  Those double doors were already closed and I could see a woman standing in front of them. She was bending forward and fixing some sort of a metal chain around the two door handles.

  Keep still, I told myself. No one has seen you yet. There’s no reason in the world why they should come and look behind the screen. But one false move, one cough, one sneeze, one nose blow, one little sound of any sort, and it won’t be just one witch that gets you. It’ll be two hundred!

  At that point, I think I fainted. The whole thing was altogether too much for a small boy to cope with. But I don’t believe I was out for more than a few seconds, and when I came to, I was lying on the carpet and I was still, thank heavens, behind the screen. There was absolute silence all around me.

  Rather shakily, I got to my knees and peered once again through the crack in the screen.

  FRIZZLED LIKE A FRITTER

  All the women, or rather the witches, were now sitting motionless in their chairs and staring as though hypnotized at somebody who had suddenly appeared on the platform. That somebody was another woman.

  The first thing I noticed about this woman was her size. She was tiny, probably no more than four and a half feet tall. She looked quite young, I guessed about twenty-five or -six, and she was very pretty. She had on a rather stylish long black dress that reached almost to the ground and she wore black gloves that came up to her elbows. Unlike the others, she wasn’t wearing a hat.

  She didn’t look to me like a witch at all, but she couldn’t possibly not be one, otherwise what on earth was she doing up there on the platform? And why, for heaven’s sake, were all the other witches gazing at her with such a mixture of adoration, awe, and fear?

  Very slowly, the young lady on the platform raised her hands to her face. I saw her gloved fingers unhooking something behind her ears, and then . . . then she caught hold of her cheeks and lifted her face clean away! The whole of that pretty face came away in her hands!

  It was a mask!

  As she took off the mask, she turned sideways and placed it carefully upon a small table nearby, and when she turned around again and faced us, I very nearly screamed out loud.

  That face of hers was the most frightful and frightening thing I have ever seen. Just looking at it gave me the shakes all over. It was so crumpled and wizened, so shrunken and shriveled, it looked as though it had been pickled in vinegar. It was a fearsome and ghastly sight. There was something terribly wrong with it, something foul and putrid and decayed. It seemed quite literally to be rotting away at the edges, and in the middle of the face, all around the mouth and cheeks, I could see the skin all cankered and worm-eaten, as though maggots were working away in there.

  There are times when something is so frightful you become mesmerized by it and can’t look away. I was like that now. I was transfixed. I was numbed. I was magnetized by the sheer horror of this woman’s features. But there was more to it than that. There was a look of serpents in those eyes of hers as they flashed around the audience.

  I knew immediately, of course, that this was none other than The Grand High Witch herself. I knew also why she had worn a mask. She could never have moved around in public, let alone book in at an hotel, with her real face. Everyone who saw her would have run away screaming.

  “The doors!” shouted The Grand High Witch in a voice that filled the room and bounced around the walls. “Are they chained and bolted?”

  “The doors are chained and bolted, Your Grandness,” answered a voice in the audience.

  The brilliant snake’s eyes that were set so deep in that dreadful rotting worm-eaten face glared unblinkingly at the witches who sat facing her. “You may rrree-moof your gloves!” she shouted. Her voice, I noticed, had that same hard metallic quality as the voice of the witch I had met under the conker tree, only it was far louder and much much harsher. It rasped. It grated. It snarled. It scraped. It shrieked. And it growled.

  Everyone in the room was peeling off her gloves. I was watching the hands of those in the back row. I wanted very much to see what their fingers looked like and whether my grandmother had been right. Ah! . . . Yes! . . . I could see several of them now! I could see the brown claws curving over the tips of the fingers! They were about two inches long, those claws, and sharp at the ends!

  “You may rrree-moof your shoes!” barked The Grand High Witch.

  I heard a sigh of relief going up from all the witches in the room as they kicked off their narrow high-heeled shoes, and then I got a glimpse under the chairs of several pairs of stockinged feet, square and completely toeless. Revolting they were, as though the toes had been sliced away from the feet with a carving knife.

  “You may rrree-moof your vigs!” snarled The Grand High Witch. She had a peculiar way of speaking. There was some sort of a foreign accent there, something harsh and guttural, and she seemed to have trouble pronouncing the letter w. As well as that, she did something funny with the letter r. She would roll it round and round her mouth like a piece of hot pork crackling before spitting it out. “Rrree-moof your vigs and get some fresh air into your spotty scalps!” she shouted, and another sigh of relief arose from the audience as all the hands went up to the heads and all the wigs (with the hats still on them) were lifted away.

  There now appeared in front of me row upon row of bald female heads, a sea of naked scalps, every one of them red and itchy-looking from being rubbed by the linings of the wigs. I simply cannot tell you how awful they were, and somehow the whole sight was made more grotesque because underneath those frightful scabby bald heads, the bodies were dressed in fashionable and rather pretty clothes. It was monstrous. It was unnatural.

  Oh heavens, I thought. Oh help! Oh Lord have mercy on me! These foul bald-headed females are child-killers, every one of them, and here I am imprisoned in the same room and I can’t escape!

  At that point, a new and doubly horrifying thought struck me. My grandmother had said that with their special nose-holes they could smell out a child on a pitch-black night from right across the other side of the road. Up to now, my grandmother had been right every time. It seemed a certainty therefore that one of the witches in the back row was going to sniff me out at any moment and then the yell of “Dogs’ droppings!” would go up all over the room and I would be cornered like a rat.

  I knelt on the carpet behind the screen, hardly daring to breathe.

  Then suddenly I remembered another very important thing my grandmother had told me. “The dirtier you are,” she had said, “the harder it is for a witch to smell you out.”

  How long since I had last had a bath?

  Not for ages. I had my own room in the hotel and my grandmother never bothered with silly things like that. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’d had a bath since we arrived.

  When had I last washed my hands or face?

  Certainly not this morning.

  Not yesterday either.

  I glanced down at my hands. They were covered with smudge and mud and goodness knows what else besides.

  So perhaps I had a chance after all. The stink-waves couldn’t possibly get out through all that dirt.

  “Vitches of Inkland!” shouted The Grand High Witch. She herself, I noticed, had not taken off either her wig or her gloves or her shoes. “Vitches of Inkland!” she yelled.

  The audience stirred uneasily and sat up straight in their chairs.

  “Miserable vitches!” she yelled. “Useless lazy vitches! Feeble frrribbling vitches! You are a heap of idle good-for-nothing vurms!”

  A shudder went through the audience. The Grand High Witch was clearly in an ugly mood and they knew it. I had a feeling that something awful was going to happen soon.

  “I am having my breakfast this morning,” cried The Grand High Witch, “and I am loo
king out of the vindow at the beach, and vot am I seeing? I am asking you, vot am I seeing? I am seeing a rrree-volting sight! I am seeing hundreds, I am seeing thousands of rrrotten rrree-pulsive little children playing on the sand! It is putting me rrright off my food! Vye have you not got rrrid of them?” she screamed. “Vye have you not rrrubbed them all out, these filthy smelly children?”

  With each word she spoke, flecks of pale-blue phlegm shot from her mouth like little bullets.

  “I am asking you vye!” she screamed.

  Nobody answered her question.

  “Children smell!” she screamed. “They stink out the vurld! Vee do not vont these children arrround here!”

  The bald heads in the audience all nodded vigorously.

  “Vun child a veek is no good to me!” The Grand High Witch cried out. “Is that the best you can do?”

  “We will do better,” murmured the audience. “We will do much better.”

  “Better is no good either!” shrieked The Grand High Witch. “I demand maximum rrree-sults! So here are my orders! My orders are that every single child in this country shall be rrrubbed out, sqvashed, sqvirted, sqvittered, and frrrittered before I come here again in one year’s time! Do I make myself clear?”

  A great gasp went up from the audience. I saw the witches all looking at one another with deeply troubled expressions. And I heard one witch at the end of the front row saying aloud, “All of them! We can’t possibly wipe out all of them!”

  The Grand High Witch whipped around as though someone had stuck a skewer into her bottom. “Who said that?” she snapped. “Who dares to argue vith me? It vos you, vos it not?” She pointed a gloved finger as sharp as a needle at the witch who had spoken.