A Bad Spell for the Worst Witch (6 page)

Form Two filed into the potion laboratory after dinner for an hour of spell-making. Maud and Enid were still racking their brains as to the whereabouts of their friend, and Mildred felt utterly helpless as they passed by her jar and she heard Maud say, ‘Perhaps she
has
run away, Enid. I mean, I can’t think where else she’s gone and she knows she’ll get into the most dreadful trouble if she turns up now without a good excuse.’

‘I’m
here
!’ Mildred tried to shriek, but it only came out as a frenzied croaking.

‘That is the noisiest frog I’ve ever had in this laboratory,’ snapped Miss Hardbroom with a piercing glance at the jar. Mildred lapsed into silence and fixed her eyes on Maud in the hope that she might be able to send some sort of message through the air – like a radio wave – to her friend. It almost succeeded.

‘Enid,’ said Maud, as they sorted through the ingredients for an invisibility potion, ‘I’m sure that frog’s staring at me. It hasn’t taken its eyes off our table for the last ten minutes.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Enid, ‘frogs don’t stare at people.’

‘Well, that one does,’ said Maud. ‘Look!’

Enid looked. The little frog was definitely gazing hard in Maud’s direction, and when it saw Enid turn to look, it began jumping up and down and croaking like a mad thing.

‘Maud,’ said Miss Hardbroom, ‘would you please remove that frog from the jar and put it into the box in the cupboard? We do not wish to listen to
that
noise all afternoon.’

‘CRAARK!’ pleaded Mildred, ‘CRAARK! CRAAARK! CRAAARK!’ Maud approached the shelf cautiously, reached into the jar, and took Mildred out.

Mildred gave one last, long look into Maud’s eyes, but she could see that there was no hope of Maud recognizing a half-mad frog as her best friend. There was nothing for it but to flee.

Mildred leapt into the air as high as her new, powerful legs would take her, and landed with a soft ‘splat’ on Maud and Enid’s bench.

‘Don’t just
stand
there girls!’ bellowed Miss Hardbroom, ‘Catch the creature!’

The entire class took off in pursuit of the frog as it sprang nimbly from bench to bench. Hands clutched and faces loomed, and suddenly Mildred remembered that the class would be making an invisibility potion. (Miss Hardbroom had told them to revise for it after breakfast.) Mildred dived for Ethel’s bench, knowing that Ethel would have made the best potion of all, and there it was, dark green and bubbling in the cauldron, with a half-full test-tube conveniently spilling a puddle of the liquid onto the bench. Mildred’s frog-tongue shot out and lapped as much as it could.

‘Oh, Miss Hardbroom!’ she heard Ethel cry, ‘The frog’s disappeared!’

Mildred heaved a sigh of relief and leapt onto the floor where she huddled in perfect silence under the bookcase near the door.

‘How very strange,’ mused Miss Hardbroom, ‘not only the noisiest, but also the most knowledgeable frog I have ever been privileged to meet.’

‘I’m sure it was trying to tell me something,’ whispered Maud to Enid. ‘Perhaps it knows something about Mildred?’

‘What could a
frog
know?’ asked Enid.

Maud shrugged her shoulders. ‘
I
don’t know,’ she replied, ‘but it was no ordinary frog. I can tell you
that
for certain.’

owering beneath the bookcase, Mildred dared not move in case she had begun to be visible again. (When you have taken an invisibility potion, you reappear very gradually, head first, followed by the rest of the body.)

In fact, being invisible is a very odd sensation indeed. Imagine holding out your leg and feeling it with your invisible hand while being unable actually to see it. For this reason, walking becomes rather a difficult experience as you can feel your feet moving along but cannot see where they are going. This means that you often find yourself moving in the opposite direction to the one intended which, of course, is extremely annoying.

Mildred held out her arm to see if it had begun to reappear but it hadn’t. Her patience paid off at last when she heard Miss Hardbroom tell the girls to pack up their books, and after much clattering and bustling, the door closed and the laboratory fell silent.

Mildred hopped out and looked around. As usual, there was a gap of several inches under the door. In fact, it seemed to be a school speciality that none of the doors fitted properly and the windows (most of which were slit windows) had no glass in them at all. The whole school seemed to have been designed with the sole purpose of freezing all the pupils to death.

Mildred squeezed through the gap and set off as fast as possible along the corridor and down the spiral staircase to the yard. From there she hopped to the pond at the back of the school, for she felt sure that she could hide safely there in the weeds and rushes while she tried to find some solution to her appalling problem.

Sitting on a stone in the middle of the water was the large frog that Mildred had often seen, and which had been the inspiration for the tale which had scared Ethel’s sister.

‘Craark!’ it said, and to Mildred’s delight, she found that she could understand what the creature meant. It said, ‘What on earth’s the matter with you? Where’s the rest of your body?’

Mildred realized that her head had reappeared, which must have looked rather alarming, bobbing about all over the place with no body attached.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Mildred. ‘I’ve taken an invisibility potion and I’m just coming back into view. You’ll be able to see all of me in a moment.’