CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: A LITTLE DRINK OR THREE

Griselda drinks too much whiskey, and it's no normal whiskey, appearing as it did from nowhere....

It took Griselda almost no time at all to hurtle like some kind of demon from the darker shades of our imagination to the little window of her accommodation within Scrumblenose University where she hovered as still as a humming-bird after nectar, trying to work out how she might get to the other side of the pane of glass that confronted her. It should be easy. After all, she'd passed through glass quite a few times and only rarely had it broken. But magic is a strange thing: at least it was for Griselda, because she had never had any clear idea how she did it. She supposed it was a matter of mind over matter, of the power of her will, but then when she tried to make something simple happen, like a pencil roll across a table, nothing happened. And one minutes it was playing with abstract shapes in her head and the next it was whispering about tickling t*****s.

It had been easy in the good old days when it had been purely satanic!

It was fortunate that nobody chose that moment to look up or they would have seen her and maybe even heard her as she tried to find the right form of words to breach the glass. But nobody did, and she muttered to herself as she tried to impose her will on the simple pane of window-glass.

It was, she thought to herself, just one of those things. She had a power, but she had never been exactly privy to what it was. She had even produced a car out of nowhere for the hapless Spotty (Lucifer) to drive off in, but how she'd done it was lost to her. A car, after all, is a complex thing and she had no idea how they worked, yet she had produced one and had known she had produced it. It was one of those things; they happen without a great deal of conscious thought and, indeed, conscious thought seems to get in the way. You might as well ask her the distance to the sun for all she knew how it happened.

Almost ninety three million miles she thought inside her head.

And then, without giving the matter any further consideration, she found herself inside her room and staring at the little bed that looked, suddenly, the most comfortable and inviting that any bed had ever looked to her. She was weary, in fact, she told herself, she was wearier than weary. She wiped one hand nervously across her forehead and decided to get undressed, properly undressed and put on a nightie, when a whisky bottle, nice and full and with the seal unbroken, appeared on her desk next to a glass tumbler that may or may not have always been there. Whisky hadn't been on her mind, and certainly not this bottle of whisky, but there it was.

It comes to something when you produce stuff from nowhere without even thinking of it first, she thought, and grinned to herself. But I'm not complaining, no sir, no madam, I'm not complaining! I think I've earned a little drink for a change!

It was spooky the way the metal cap to the whisky bottle started turning until it had broken the seal, and then unscrewed itself, slow and sedate and deliberate. It was even spookier the way the bottle lifted off the wooden surface of her desk and tilted over the tumbler, and it was extremely magical the way the amber fluid half-filled the glass like liquid gold. And it didn't seem to know when to stop pouring.

That's a great deal too much for a woman of a certain age, but it'll do! thought Griselda with a grin on her weary old face, and she picked up the glass tumbler and took a gently fiery sip from it.

“Ah, that's better! That's a drop of good stuff,” she told herself, speaking aloud this time, letting her voice quietly fill the room. “Just every now and then I like a drop of good stuff, and this is as good as it gets! Better than the watered-down stuff Thomas the Greek sells at the village pub. He ought to be put in the stocks for what he sells to little old innocents like me! But this is better, at this time of the day when a soul's sore weary, than just about anything, and if I'm not careful I'll be getting tipsy and then I'll be anybody's, assuming they can find time for an old bird like me!”

Unsuspected by her and far away in the village of Swanspottle, behind the bar of its only pub a wooden and weathered medieval stocks formed round the landlord, one Thomas the Greek, and a sudden arrival of thirsty customers, seeing how restricted he was, started throwing rotten fruit that had appeared from nowhere right at him, and knobbly old cauliflowers that were past their sell-by date and had mysteriously materialised in a fine old barrel and were ready to be taken and launched at the confused landlord.

She took another sip, quite an extravagant one, and shivered contentedly when she realised the whisky was going straight to her head, and that was probably because she hadn't eaten since goodness-knows when.

Whisky on an empty stomach makes the world go all twinkly, she told herself, and cackled before she took another sip, a big one, emptying the glass. It came as no surprise to her when the bottle picked itself off the table and, a little uncertainly, she thought, poured her a second drink as if the bottle itself had sipped a drop too much.

Now, Griselda had never been the drunken sort. She had the occasional glass of stout at the pub, but that rarely did anything to her head on account of the massive amount of dilution secretly administered by the landlord of the place. Not even Tom Coppley, who drank unmercifully and who bloated up like a balloon before he vomited it all over the tap-room floor, got remotely actually drunk, though he did occasionally deign to stagger because that seemed the appropriate thing to do. So Griselda was and always had been a sober living person, and not even she had any clear idea why she had taken to forty percent proof spirit with such eagerness that afternoon. But she had, and that second glass became a third and that third made her keel over.

She lay prostrate on her bed (where good fortune rather than anything else had dictated that she fell) and closed her eyes, whereupon the world both inside and outside her head started spinning. If she squinted at the ceiling the light fixture began revolving in ever-decreasing circles until she felt that the very movement would make her sick and she forced her eyes ever tighter shut.

“I don't know why anyone finds this remotely enjoyable,” she slurred to herself, and groaned.

There was, of course, one question she hadn't bothered to ask herself and that was how the whisky came to appear on her table in the first place.

It hadn't crossed her mind that for anything like that to appear she would have at least had to think of it in the first place, but she hadn't. True, she had felt an almost perverse gratitude when she spotted it, but that in no way constituted any kind of request for the stuff before it had appeared. And when it had poured itself out without so much as a by-your-leave it had never entered her head that the merest desire for its golden contents hadn't even started surfacing inside her head.

For once in her life, and in later years she was to put it down to extreme weariness mixed with an almost galloping hunger, magic had been forced on her without her even beginning to notice.

And when the world stopped spinning for her and sleep took over, it was the most unhealthy and dream-filled sleep imaginable.

And in that dreaming sleep she roamed over her own life, from birth to the moment she sipped from the wretched tumbler, every moment of it, every tear spilled as a child, every punishment, every dream, every hope for love and redemption and all the things human minds are heir to, every dark thought, every mischievous and devious plot, every merciless trick as she had made her rapid way up the political ladder a freakish year earlier.

And as she dreamed these things, as the years of her life floated past her drunken brain, in his room down stairs a manic Professor Stroggleoff was trapping them in a bottle made of the crystal flowers picked, he always said, from the meadows on the sun, and was conducting her dreams as though they were a symphony.

Like a manic bearded spider he waved his arms in time to the melodies in an old woman's head, and cackled to himself as if cackling itself was magic. And he smiled at the old woman's thoughts as though they formed a melody.

Which in a way they did. They were the tunes of a long life, and they were dark.