A Blink of the Screen

for the brief respite that it brought you’d look over your shoulder. And you’d see how lovely and rich and dark and beguiling your shadow had become …
    Nanny Ogg was sitting out in her back garden in the no-nonsense way of old ladies everywhere, legs wide apart for the healthy circulation of the air. She was keeping an eye on one of her sons and two of her grandsons, who were digging her vegetable garden, and occasionally she would give them shouts of encouragement or point out bits that hadn’t been done properly.
    In her broad lap was a heap of golden leaves from her tobacco harvest, which she was shredding and dipping into her special herbal and honey mixture. After it had matured in her press over the winter, people would come a long way for Ogg’s Nutty Shag, Not To be Smoked for At Least Three Hundred Years before Operating Heavy Machinery.
    And occasionally she’d take a swig from the pint pot beside her.
    This time, as she reached down for it, she saw the bubbles clear and the surface turn as calm as old tea.
    ‘Flat already?’ she said aloud.
    She glanced across the village. Rooks were swarming up out of the elm trees in battle order, cawing loudly.
    Nanny Ogg ambled into her cottage and went to the scullery, where the milk jugs cooled in the sink. One sniff was enough. What they contained was practically cheese. And it’d been fresh milk an hour ago.
    A faint rustling made her look down. Dozens of beetles were running under the door and scuttling into the cracks between the flagstones.
    A witch lived by the little signs. Butter wouldn’t come, wine became vinegar, spiders ran for cover … people thought it meant there was a storm coming, and in a way they were right.
    And a witch used what was to hand, too. All that fiddlin’ with coloured candles and crystal balls and whatnot, that was fine for them as needed it, but at a pinch you used what you could reach.
    In this case she reached down and lifted the heavy wooden lid of the well and looked down into the dark waters.
    There was nothing there. But there was never anything in a crystal, either. There was simply emptiness, which said: fill me up.
    Nanny’s inner eye saw snow, and rock, and the outline of a hooked nose made of stone …
    ‘Oh, the daft ole fool,’ she muttered.
    A moment later her son and grandsons saw her burst from the house, carrying her broomstick. She leapt aboard and applied the magic so hard that it bobbed along almost vertically before she was able to force the handle down and point it towards the mountains.
    Ten minutes later snow billowed up as she touched down in the little valley. It was hard to find, even from the air. She patted the guardian Witch as she hurried past. She’d never found her frightening, even when she was young.
    Some young wizard who’d spent his holidays up here, knocking at rocks with a little hammer, had said the Witch at the mouth of the cave was just the result of dissolved rock dripping and dripping and piling up in a stalagmite for thousands of years. As if that explained anything. It just said how she was made, not why she was here. And the man hadn’t gone very far into the cave, she recalled. He’d remembered other things he had to do. The place took men that way.
    Her boots splashed into the rock pools as she left the light behind.
    She’d tried being alone with her thoughts once, but had never tried it again. It had been too dull.
    Oh yes, the things she was ashamed of were here, but she’d never tried to hide them from herself and they were simply memories and held no terror. And here were all the things she’d done that she should have done, and mostly they’d been enjoyable. And there were all the things she’d done that she shouldn’t have done, and they’d been fun too. More fun, in many cases. And she’d never regretted them, either, except maybe sometimes when, a little wistfully, she’d regretted she hadn’t done them sooner and that occasions for doing them now did not, as it were, arise all that often …
    ‘Oh, Esme? What’ve you done?’
    She reached down and pulled at the slumped figure.
    ‘Come on,’ she said cheerfully, slinging the dead weight across her shoulders. ‘You don’t have to hang around here, thinking. No one ever got anywhere by thinking all the time.’
    When they were outside she managed to heave Granny on to the stick and strapped her safely with her own striped stockings.
    People say things like ‘lost in thought’ and think